One of the critical elements of your Disaster Recovery Plan will need to address is what your business will do in the event your main physical facilities are rendered inaccessible by a disaster. This could be anything as little as complete loss of power (and backup utilities) for more than 24 hours, or as serious as your primary facilities being entirely destroyed.
How do you plan for this? By identifying the facilities that you and your people will use in both short- and long-term scenarios, and making sure they are capable of running your operations, as part of your disaster planning. Ideally before you ever need them.
There are two different types of facilities that this post will address: Disaster Recovery Sites and Disaster Re-Location Facilities. A lot of recovery experts do not distinguish between these two sites, but given that they have fundamentally different purposes, I have decided to discuss them separately.
So how are they different?