Which DR option provides the longest recovery time but is the least expensive?

Which DR option provides the longest recovery time but is the least expensive?

• A. Warm Site
• B. Cold Site
• C. Hot Spare
• D. Hot Site

Answer: (B)

Disaster recovery options trade off recovery time against cost. The option with the longest recovery time is the one where there is no active hardware or data ready to run, and you must bring everything in, install it, and restore from backups. That’s a cold site. It provides space, power, and cooling, but you don’t keep the production equipment or synchronized data on hand, so you have to procure gear, configure systems, and recover data after a disruption. All of that takes time, which is why the recovery time is the longest, and the cost is the lowest because you’re not paying for running redundant hardware or ongoing licenses. In contrast, a hot site is fully equipped and continuously synchronized with production, allowing near-immediate failover and minimal downtime, but it’s the most expensive option. A warm site sits in between: some critical hardware is pre-installed and data can be restored quickly, but you still need some setup and data restoration, so recovery time is longer than a hot site but shorter than a cold site, with a moderate cost. A hot spare is a ready-to-go standby system on-site, enabling very fast recovery at a higher ongoing cost due to the duplicate hardware and licenses. So the cold site best fits the description of the longest recovery time with the least expense.

Disaster recovery options trade off recovery time against cost. The option with the longest recovery time is the one where there is no active hardware or data ready to run, and you must bring everything in, install it, and restore from backups. That’s a cold site. It provides space, power, and cooling, but you don’t keep the production equipment or synchronized data on hand, so you have to procure gear, configure systems, and recover data after a disruption. All of that takes time, which is why the recovery time is the longest, and the cost is the lowest because you’re not paying for running redundant hardware or ongoing licenses.

In contrast, a hot site is fully equipped and continuously synchronized with production, allowing near-immediate failover and minimal downtime, but it’s the most expensive option. A warm site sits in between: some critical hardware is pre-installed and data can be restored quickly, but you still need some setup and data restoration, so recovery time is longer than a hot site but shorter than a cold site, with a moderate cost. A hot spare is a ready-to-go standby system on-site, enabling very fast recovery at a higher ongoing cost due to the duplicate hardware and licenses.

So the cold site best fits the description of the longest recovery time with the least expense.