Warm site

A warm site is an alternate facility that sits between the extremes: the building, power, connectivity, and most or all of the hardware are ready, but current data is not. On activation, the organisation must bring the systems up and restore data from backups before service resumes, which puts recovery time in the range of hours to days rather than the near-immediate switchover of a hot site.

The warm site is the cost and speed middle ground, and that is exactly how the exam frames it. It avoids the standing expense of live data replication and duplicated processing while avoiding the weeks-long procurement and build-out a cold site requires. The deciding input is the RTO: a warm site is the right answer only when the business can tolerate the days it takes to restore from backup, and the recovery point achieved depends entirely on how recent those backups are.

Exam relevance: if a scenario describes a facility with equipment installed but data restored from backup on activation, or an RTO measured in days paired with cost pressure, the answer is warm site. The nearest confusable is the hot site, distinguished by one fact: the hot site already holds current data, the warm site does not. If the facility is an empty shell with only power and space, it is a cold site instead.