home/glossary/Cold Site

Cold Site

nounid 1847·updated May 12, 2026
candidate

Backup site that can be up and operational in a relatively short time span, such as a day or two. Provision of services, such as telephone lines and power, is taken care of, and the basic office furniture might be in place, but there is unlikely to be any computer equipment, even though the building might well have a network infrastructure and a room ready to act as a server room. In most cases, cold sites provide the physical location and basic services.

polysemousMWE

Classifications

Entity Type

Physical0%rule-basedmulti_axis_classifier_low_confidence.v1

Sensitivity

Regulated78%llm-generatedllm:claude-haiku-4-5

Information Class

unclassified

Variants

plural
Cold Sites
possessive
Cold Site's
pluralpossessive
Cold Sites'

Framework definitions

NISTIR 7298: Glossary of Key Information Security Terms, Revision 22 sensesview framework →
§1
Backup site that can be up and operational in a relatively short time span, such as a day or two. Provision of services, such as telephone lines and power, is taken care of, and the basic office furniture might be in place, but there is unlikely to be any computer equipment, even though the building might well have a network infrastructure and a room ready to act as a server room. In most cases, cold sites provide the physical location and basic services.
§2 · sense_2_pending_review
A backup facility that has the necessary electrical and physical components of a computer facility, but does not have the computer equipment in place. The site is ready to receive the necessary replacement computer equipment in the event that the user has to move from their main computing location to an alternate site.
CNSSI-4009 (Glossary of Information Assurance Terms)1 senseview framework →
§1
Backup site that can be up and operational in a relatively short time span, such as a day or two. Provision of services, such as telephone lines and power, is taken care of, and the basic office furniture might be in place, but there is unlikely to be any computer equipment, even though the building might well have a network infrastructure and a room ready to act as a server room. In most cases, cold sites provide the physical location and basic services.
NIST SP 800-341 senseview framework →
§1
A backup facility that has the necessary electrical and physical components of a computer facility, but does not have the computer equipment in place. The site is ready to receive the necessary replacement computer equipment in the event that the user has to move from their main computing location to an alternate site.

Outgoing relationships

No outgoing triples
This term is not the subject of any RDF-style relationship yet.

Incoming relationships

No incoming triples
No other term currently asserts a relationship to this one.