What type of disaster recovery implementation involves having critical systems operational but not fully equipped until needed?

A warm site is a type of disaster recovery implementation that allows for critical systems to be operational but not fully equipped until needed. In this setup, the necessary hardware and networking infrastructure are in place, but the systems might not have all the data to be fully functional. This means that while the warm site can quickly be activated and brought online, it might still require some time to load data or applications needed to be entirely operational.

This approach balances cost and recovery time. It is more prepared than a cold site, which typically lacks equipment and requires a significant amount of time to set up after a disaster. On the other hand, a hot site is fully equipped and operational, ready to take over the workload immediately, often incurring higher costs due to the need for redundancy and constant readiness. An active/active setup involves multiple data centers working simultaneously, which provides real-time failover capabilities but requires significant resources.

Thus, a warm site is ideal for organizations that require a quicker recovery than a cold site can provide but do not need the immediate readiness of a hot site.