ATP Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company's RTO is 4 hours and RPO is 1 hour. Which recovery strategy best satisfies both requirements?
- Cold site with daily tape backups
- Warm site with hourly incremental backups (Correct answer)
- Hot site with continuous data replication
- Cloud snapshot every 6 hours
Correct answer: Warm site with hourly incremental backups
A warm site with hourly incremental backups meets a 4-hour RTO (site can be activated within hours) and 1-hour RPO (maximum 1 hour of data loss).
Question 2: During a BCP tabletop exercise, a team discovers that a critical vendor cannot meet their stated SLA during a regional disaster. What is the BEST immediate action?
- Cancel the vendor contract immediately
- Document the gap and update the BCP with contingency vendor options (Correct answer)
- Assume the SLA will be honored and proceed
- Escalate to legal for breach of contract
Correct answer: Document the gap and update the BCP with contingency vendor options
Tabletop exercises are meant to uncover gaps; the finding should be documented and the BCP updated with alternative vendor contingencies.
Question 3: What does the term 'failback' refer to in disaster recovery?
- Switching operations to a secondary site after a disaster
- Restoring operations to the primary site after it is recovered (Correct answer)
- Failing all systems back to a previous checkpoint
- Reverting a failed patch to the prior software version
Correct answer: Restoring operations to the primary site after it is recovered
Failback is the process of returning production operations from the DR site back to the original primary site once it is restored.
Question 4: Which metric measures the probability that a system will be operational at any given point in time?
- Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Availability percentage (Correct answer)
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Correct answer: Availability percentage
Availability (often expressed as a percentage like 99.9%) measures the proportion of time a system is operational and accessible.
Question 5: A financial firm requires that no more than 15 minutes of transaction data can be lost in any disaster scenario. This requirement defines which DR metric?
- RTO
- RPO (Correct answer)
- MTTR
- MAO
Correct answer: RPO
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines the maximum tolerable amount of data loss measured in time, in this case 15 minutes.
Question 6: Which type of BIA output directly informs the prioritization order for system recovery during a disaster?
- Asset inventory list
- Criticality ranking of business functions (Correct answer)
- Employee contact directory
- Vendor performance scorecard
Correct answer: Criticality ranking of business functions
The criticality ranking produced by a BIA tells recovery teams which business functions and supporting systems must be restored first.
Question 7: An organization stores its DR plan exclusively on the internal network that goes offline during a disaster. What is the MOST serious problem with this approach?
- The plan may become outdated quickly
- Recovery teams cannot access the plan when it is needed most (Correct answer)
- The plan is not encrypted and poses a security risk
- Network storage is too expensive for DR documentation
Correct answer: Recovery teams cannot access the plan when it is needed most
A DR plan that is only accessible via systems that may be unavailable during the disaster defeats its own purpose; plans must be accessible offline or out-of-band.
ATP Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity 2
A company's RTO is 4 hours and RPO is 1 hour.
Which recovery strategy best satisfies both requirements?