BCI Case Analysis & Practical Application 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A financial services firm discovers its primary data center is flooded. The RTO for core banking is 4 hours. Which action should the BC team take FIRST?
- Notify regulators of the incident
- Invoke the IT disaster recovery plan and activate the alternate site (Correct answer)
- Conduct a post-incident review
- Update the business impact analysis
Correct answer: Invoke the IT disaster recovery plan and activate the alternate site
Activating the alternate site directly addresses the RTO obligation and restores critical operations within the required timeframe.
Question 2: During a tabletop exercise, a team realizes their contact list contains outdated mobile numbers. What does this reveal about the BC program?
- The BIA needs to be redone
- Maintenance procedures for plan documentation are inadequate (Correct answer)
- The recovery time objectives are unrealistic
- The exercise was poorly designed
Correct answer: Maintenance procedures for plan documentation are inadequate
Outdated contact information indicates that the plan maintenance cycle is not keeping documentation current.
Question 3: A hospital's emergency generator fails during a power outage. The BC plan assumed generator availability as a given dependency. This situation best illustrates which planning gap?
- Insufficient budget allocation
- Failure to identify single points of failure within recovery resources (Correct answer)
- Lack of stakeholder engagement
- Inadequate staff training
Correct answer: Failure to identify single points of failure within recovery resources
Treating the generator as a guaranteed resource without testing or redundancy represents a failure to address single points of failure.
Question 4: A logistics company tests its BC plan annually but has not updated it since a major supplier was replaced. Which BCI good practice principle is being violated?
- Embedding BC in organizational culture
- Ongoing maintenance to reflect organizational change (Correct answer)
- Executive sponsorship of the BC program
- Integration with incident management
Correct answer: Ongoing maintenance to reflect organizational change
BC plans must be updated whenever significant organizational changes, such as supplier changes, occur to remain valid.
Question 5: A manufacturing plant's BC plan identifies 'assemble incident management team' as the first response step. During an actual event, team members are unreachable. What should the plan have included?
- A longer testing schedule
- Cascading call trees with named alternates for each role (Correct answer)
- A higher IT budget
- More detailed process maps
Correct answer: Cascading call trees with named alternates for each role
Cascading call trees with alternates ensure roles can be filled even when primary contacts are unavailable.
Question 6: An organization's BIA shows that its payroll function has an MTPoD of 72 hours. A disruption extends to 96 hours. What is the likely consequence?
- Reputational damage only
- The organization will breach its maximum tolerable period of disruption, leading to severe impact (Correct answer)
- Regulatory fines are automatically triggered
- The BIA becomes invalid
Correct answer: The organization will breach its maximum tolerable period of disruption, leading to severe impact
Exceeding the MTPoD means the organization is operating beyond the point at which consequences become unacceptable.
Question 7: A retail chain activates its BC plan during a cyber attack but finds that staff have never practiced the manual order-processing workaround. What does this indicate?
- The cyber attack was too sophisticated to plan for
- Workaround procedures were not incorporated into training and exercises (Correct answer)
- The IT department failed to prevent the attack
- The plan was correctly designed but incorrectly invoked
Correct answer: Workaround procedures were not incorporated into training and exercises
Manual workarounds are only effective if staff are trained and practiced in executing them before an event occurs.
BCI Case Analysis & Practical Application 2
A financial services firm discovers its primary data center is flooded.
The RTO for core banking is 4 hours.
Which action should the BC team take FIRST?