CIM Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the primary purpose of a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) in a business continuity program?
- To identify and prioritize critical business functions and quantify the impact of their disruption (Correct answer)
- To create a detailed technical recovery procedure for IT systems
- To assign blame for past incidents and prevent recurrence
- To calculate the total cost of insurance premiums needed
Correct answer: To identify and prioritize critical business functions and quantify the impact of their disruption
A BIA identifies critical business functions, estimates financial and operational impacts of disruption, and informs recovery priority and resource allocation.
Question 2: Which term describes the maximum tolerable length of time that a business process can be offline before causing unacceptable harm?
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) (Correct answer)
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Correct answer: Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)
MTD (also called Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption) defines the absolute outer limit of acceptable downtime for a business process.
Question 3: During a tabletop exercise, participants discover their DR plan references a vendor hotline that no longer exists. What should be the immediate corrective action?
- Declare the exercise a failure and reschedule
- Update the plan with current vendor contact information and reassign ownership for keeping it current (Correct answer)
- Proceed with the exercise without correction since it is only a drill
- Escalate to senior management for disciplinary action
Correct answer: Update the plan with current vendor contact information and reassign ownership for keeping it current
Tabletop exercises are designed to surface exactly these gaps; the correct response is to document and remediate the discrepancy and assign ongoing ownership.
Question 4: A company replicates data to a secondary site every four hours. If a disaster occurs, what is the worst-case data loss scenario?
- Zero data loss because replication is active
- Up to four hours of data (Correct answer)
- Up to eight hours of data
- Loss depends solely on the RTO, not replication frequency
Correct answer: Up to four hours of data
The Recovery Point Objective is determined by the replication interval; with four-hour cycles, up to four hours of transactions could be lost.
Question 5: Which recovery site type offers the fastest time-to-operational but also carries the highest ongoing cost?
- Cold site
- Warm site
- Hot site (Correct answer)
- Mobile recovery unit
Correct answer: Hot site
A hot site is a fully equipped, staffed, and continuously synchronized duplicate facility that can assume operations within minutes but incurs significant recurring costs.
Question 6: In the context of disaster recovery, what does 'failback' mean?
- Switching operations to the secondary site during a disaster
- Returning operations to the primary site after it has been restored (Correct answer)
- Backing up data immediately after a failover event
- Testing the secondary site under production load conditions
Correct answer: Returning operations to the primary site after it has been restored
Failback is the planned process of transitioning workloads from the recovery/secondary site back to the restored primary environment.
Question 7: Which document formally authorizes activation of the Business Continuity Plan and identifies who has that authority?
- Incident Action Plan
- Crisis Communications Plan
- BCP Activation Authority Matrix (Correct answer)
- Risk Register
Correct answer: BCP Activation Authority Matrix
The Activation Authority Matrix (or equivalent document) specifies the conditions under which the BCP is triggered and which roles hold the authority to invoke it.
CIM Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity 2
What is the primary purpose of a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) in a business continuity program?