ISC2 CC Practice Question: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Incident Response
An organization is selecting a recovery site strategy that offers the fastest recovery time, measured in hours, to minimize downtime for critical applications. Which recovery site type best meets this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is assuming warm site is fast enough; candidates may pick warm site because it's a middle ground, but only hot site guarantees recovery in hours.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Hot site
A hot site is a fully equipped alternate facility that is ready to operate immediately, offering the fastest recovery time, often within hours. It mirrors the primary site's hardware, software, and data, allowing critical applications to resume quickly. Thus, D is correct.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Cloud-based recovery
Why it's wrong here
Cloud-based recovery provisions infrastructure on demand, so virtual machines must still be deployed and data restored before workloads resume, adding hours. It tempts as a scalable, low-capital alternative, and would be correct where elasticity and cost outweigh the need for near-instant failover.
- ✗
Cold site
Why it's wrong here
A cold site provides only space, power and connectivity, so all hardware must be procured, installed and configured, giving the slowest recovery. It tempts because it is the cheapest option, and would be correct for non-critical systems where weeks of downtime are acceptable.
- ✗
Warm site
Why it's wrong here
A warm site requires servers to be powered on and data restored before applications run, so recovery takes days rather than hours. It tempts because it balances cost against partial pre-installed hardware, and would suit a business tolerating multi-day outages rather than the fastest recovery.
- ✓
Hot site
Why this is correct
A hot site provides pre-installed hardware, live data replication and near-immediate failover, delivering recovery within hours. It satisfies the fastest-recovery constraint, unlike cold or warm sites, which require hardware provisioning or partial restoration before critical applications resume.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Key term
Recovery
Recovery is the process of restoring systems, data, and operations after a security incident, failure, or disaster to return to normal functioning.
Key term
Organization
An Organization is a top-level container in Google Cloud that represents your company or entities and serves as the root node for all your cloud resources, policies, and access control.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISC2 exam blueprint
This CC practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CC exam.