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Difficulty: MediumBusiness Continuity and Disaster Recovery

An organization is designing its disaster recovery strategy for a secondary data center. The business requirements state that critical services must be restored within 4 hours following a site failure (RTO = 4 hours), and data loss must not exceed 1 hour (RPO = 1 hour). To minimize ongoing operational expenses, management specifies that the secondary site should have pre-installed server and networking hardware, but production data can be synchronized periodically and application services do not need to run live in parallel during normal operations. Which disaster recovery site model best satisfies these operational and budgetary requirements?

  1. A
    Cold site
  2. Warm siteAnswer
  3. C
    Hot site
  4. D
    Active-Active site

Answer

Warm site
A warm site provides pre-configured network equipment, power, cooling, and installed hardware, but relies on periodic backups or data replication rather than active real-time transaction processing. This allows systems to be brought online within a few hours (meeting the 4-hour RTO) while incurring lower operational expenditures than a fully redundant hot site.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the given Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) metrics alongside financial constraints.
The target RTO is 4 hours, RPO is 1 hour, and operational costs must be minimized.
Understanding the threshold between near-zero downtime requirements and multi-hour recovery windows determines the appropriate recovery facility classification.
2
Evaluate the infrastructure requirements described in the scenario.
Hardware and network devices are pre-installed, but applications are not running live continuous mirror feeds.
A facility with installed equipment requiring data restoration/activation upon declaration fits the definition of a warm recovery site.
3
Compare site options against cost and setup speed parameters.
A cold site is too slow (days/weeks), while hot/active-active sites are excessively expensive. A warm site achieves the 4-hour RTO within budget constraints.
Selecting the warm site satisfies both the technical RTO requirement and the budget optimization directive.

Key Concept

Disaster Recovery Site Selection Trade-offs (Hot vs Warm vs Cold)
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Topics

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

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