SY0-701 Question 235
Single answerSite considerations: Hot , Cold , WarmA regional healthcare provider is updating its disaster recovery plan after a ransomware incident caused a 10-hour outage at its primary data center. Patient scheduling and electronic health record access must be restored within 2 hours of a future disruption, but leadership also wants to avoid the ongoing expense of maintaining fully mirrored production systems. Which recovery site option BEST meets these requirements?
- A
Hot site with fully synchronized systems and immediate failover capability
- B
Cold site with power, HVAC, and floor space available, but no preinstalled systems
- C
Warm site with network connectivity, partially configured systems, and data backups ready for restoration
- D
Mobile recovery site consisting of temporary office trailers and user workstations only
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
This question tests understanding of business continuity and disaster recovery site selection based on recovery objectives and cost constraints. A hot site offers near-immediate recovery with fully operational systems, making it ideal for very low recovery time objectives (RTOs), but it is the most expensive to maintain. A cold site is the cheapest, but it has the longest recovery time because equipment and systems must be installed and configured after a disaster. A warm site is the middle-ground option: it provides infrastructure and some system readiness, reducing recovery time while avoiding the full cost of a hot site. In practice, organizations choose among hot, warm, and cold sites by balancing RTO, recovery point objective (RPO), regulatory requirements, and budget. This aligns with common disaster recovery and business continuity guidance such as NIST SP 800-34, which emphasizes matching recovery strategies to business impact analysis results and organizational recovery requirements.
- A. Incorrect.
This is incorrect because a hot site would likely meet the 2-hour recovery objective, but it conflicts with the requirement to avoid the high ongoing cost of maintaining fully mirrored production systems. Hot sites provide the fastest recovery and are the most expensive option.
- B. Incorrect.
This is incorrect because a cold site is the least expensive option, but it would not realistically support restoration of critical healthcare systems within 2 hours. Cold sites typically provide only the facility infrastructure, so hardware deployment, system installation, and data restoration would take much longer.
- C. Correct.
This is correct because a warm site balances cost and recovery speed. It typically includes available infrastructure, network connectivity, and some preconfigured systems, allowing backups or replicated data to be restored faster than at a cold site without the full expense of a hot site. For a 2-hour recovery target with cost constraints, this is the best fit among the options provided.
- D. Incorrect.
This is incorrect because a mobile recovery site may help restore workspace availability for staff, but it does not by itself provide the server, application, and data recovery capabilities needed to quickly restore electronic health record and scheduling systems.