A hot site has the equipment, software and communications capabilities to facilitate a recovery within a few minutes or hours following the notification of a disaster to the organization's primary site. With the exception of providing your own hot site, commercial hot sites provide the greatest protection. Most will allow you up to six weeks to restore your sites if you declare a disaster. They also permit an annual amount of time to test the Disaster Plan.
The following answers are incorrect:
Cold sites. Cold sites are empty computer rooms consisting only of environmental systems, such as air conditioning and raised floors, etc. They do not meet the requirements of most regulators and boards of directors that the disaster plan be tested at least annually.
Reciprocal Agreement. Reciprocal agreements are not contracts and cannot be enforced. You cannot force someone you have such an agreement with to provide processing to you. Government regulators do not accept reciprocal agreements as valid disaster recovery backup sites.
Time Brokers. Time Brokers promise to deliver processing time on other systems. They charge a fee, but cannot guaranty that processing will always be available, especially in areas that experienced multiple disasters.
The following reference(s) were/was used to create this question:
ISC2 OIG, 2007 p368
Shon Harris AIO v3. p.710
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