Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Flashcards

Which backup strategy minimizes storage space and backup window duration but results in the longest restore time?

Answer: Incremental backup

Incremental backups capture only changes since the last backup of any type, making them fast and small, but restoration requires chaining together all incremental sets since the last full backup.

A manufacturing company identifies that losing its ERP system for more than 8 hours will result in regulatory fines and production shutdowns. This finding comes from which process?

Answer: Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) quantifies the operational, financial, and regulatory consequences of disruptions to identify critical systems and their time-sensitivity.

What does 'split-brain' refer to in the context of high-availability clustering?

Answer: A situation where two cluster nodes both believe they are the active primary and make conflicting changes

Split-brain occurs when cluster nodes lose communication and both assume primary status, potentially causing data corruption; quorum mechanisms are used to prevent it.

An organization implements replication with a 30-minute lag to the DR site as a deliberate design choice. What specific threat does this protect against?

Answer: Ransomware or logical corruption that would otherwise replicate immediately to the DR site

A deliberate replication lag creates a window of clean data at the DR site, ensuring that ransomware encryption or logical corruption doesn't instantly overwrite the DR copy.

Which DR document specifically captures the names, roles, and contact information of all personnel responsible for executing the recovery plan?

Answer: Call tree / contact roster

A call tree (also called a contact roster or notification list) documents who needs to be contacted during a disaster, in what order, and via what method.

A company's DR plan specifies a 2-hour RTO. A full interruption test reveals actual recovery takes 5.5 hours. What is the CORRECT next step?

Answer: Perform a gap analysis to identify bottlenecks and revise the plan and infrastructure to meet the 2-hour target

When test results reveal a gap between actual and target RTO, a gap analysis must identify root causes and drive plan or infrastructure changes to achieve compliance with the business requirement.

In a multi-cloud DR strategy, an organization spreads workloads across AWS and Azure. Which benefit does this primarily provide?

Answer: Protection against a single cloud provider outage causing complete service failure

Multi-cloud DR guards against vendor-specific outages by ensuring that a complete failure of one cloud provider does not take down the entire production environment.