A warm DR (Disaster Recovery) site is a type of backup location used by organizations to recover IT infrastructure and operations if their primary site becomes unavailable due to a disaster, such as a natural event, cyberattack, or hardware failure.
A warm DR site comes with essential hardware (servers, storage, networking equipment) already set up, but it does not run live production workloads or have customer data pre-installed. Data is typically replicated to the warm site on a scheduled basis (e.g., nightly or weekly backups), rather than in real time. This means the site may not have the very latest data, but it will have recent backups. In the event of a disaster, IT teams must manually restore databases, update configurations, and start up services at the warm site. This process takes more time than a hot site but is much faster than a cold site.
Warm sites offer a compromise between the high cost and immediate readiness of hot sites and the low cost but slow recovery of cold sites. They are suitable for businesses that need reasonably fast recovery but can tolerate some downtime and minor data loss