Warm site
A recovery location with hardware and connectivity in place but requiring data restoration and startup before use.
It sits between a hot site running live and a cold site that is essentially an empty room. Recovery takes hours rather than minutes, at a fraction of the cost of full duplication.
For most mid-sized businesses this is the sensible balance, particularly when the standby capacity is cloud infrastructure billed only when it runs.
Where this comes up
Warm site sits inside our backup and disaster recovery work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.
Related terms
DR site A secondary location where systems can run if the primary site becomes unavailable. Failover Switching operation to a standby system when the primary one fails. Recovery time objective The maximum time a system can be unavailable before the impact becomes unacceptable. Disaster recovery The process and capability for restoring IT systems after a major failure or destructive event.