Hot and warm sites are alternate processing facilities designed to handle incidents and disasters. Moreover, organizations switch to their alternate processing sites when their primary sites are rendered unavailable perhaps due to disastrous situations. When companies plan to recover their data and services, there are multiple options to select from depending on various factors, such as cost, laws, regulations, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.
Some of the prominent options of alternate processing or recovery sites include:
Hot Site: It is a facility with fully provisioned IT (servers, workstations, and communication links) and office spaces, which is similar to the primary site. Moreover, the servers and workstations are all pre-configured and appropriate operating systems and application software installed. However, data must be retrieved and loaded from the backup systems before operations are resumed. Unlike other options, this is costly to establish and operate.
Warm Site: Warm sites fall between hot and cold alternate processing sites. Similar to hot sites, they have the equipment ready to start. But, unlike hot sites, warm sites do not have immediate backup of data, rather it should be transported from somewhere else. And this may cause some delay to resume services.
Cold site: Warm sites is a facility equipped with appropriate electrical and environmental systems. These are empty office spaces that are designed to handle the processing load of an organization. Moreover, cold is the cheapest and the least effective recovery site.
There are also other recovery sites besides to the aforementioned options, including:
- Mobile Sites
- Cloud Sites
- Reciprocal Agreement Sites