During a quarterly tabletop exercise, the IT steering committee revises disaster-recovery plans. Leadership wants a secondary facility where identical server, storage, and network hardware is already installed and powered on, data is replicated to it almost in real time, and production workloads can resume within minutes-even though this option costs far more than other alternatives. Which disaster-recovery site type best fits these requirements?
A hot site is a fully equipped duplicate of the primary data center. Hardware, software, connectivity, and near-real-time data replication are already in place, so operations can fail over with minimal recovery-time objectives. Because everything is powered on and kept current, a hot site is significantly more expensive to maintain than warm or cold sites. A warm site has some infrastructure but usually requires additional configuration and data restoration before it can assume production workloads, so recovery takes longer. A cold site is essentially an empty facility with power and networking where all hardware and data must be brought in, resulting in the longest recovery time but the lowest cost. Cloud cold-storage vaults are intended for long-term data retention rather than immediate workload failover.