CompTIA Cloud+ Disaster Recovery Planning Questions and Answers — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An organization determines that its e-commerce application can tolerate a maximum of 4 hours of downtime before causing significant business impact. In the event of a disaster, the business can accept losing up to 1 hour of transaction data. Which of the following correctly identifies the organization's requirements?
- RTO is 1 hour, RPO is 4 hours
- RTO is 4 hours, RPO is 1 hour (Correct answer)
- SLA is 4 hours, RPO is 1 hour
- RTO is 4 hours, MTTR is 1 hour
Correct answer: RTO is 4 hours, RPO is 1 hour
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the target time within which a business process must be restored after a disaster to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity. In this scenario, it is 4 hours. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident. In this scenario, it is 1 hour of transaction data.
Question 2: A cloud administrator needs to select a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application. The business requires a low RTO, measured in minutes to a few hours. The solution must be more cost-effective than a fully replicated, active-active site. The chosen strategy involves maintaining a scaled-down but fully functional version of the production environment in a separate region, which can be quickly scaled up during a failover. Which DR strategy does this describe?
- Cold site
- Backup and restore
- Warm standby (Correct answer)
- Pilot light
Correct answer: Warm standby
A warm standby strategy involves having a scaled-down, but fully functional, copy of the production environment always running in a DR region. This allows for a fast recovery time (low RTO) because the environment is already active and just needs to be scaled up to handle the full production load. It is more cost-effective than a hot site (active-active) but faster to recover than a pilot light or backup and restore.
Question 3: Which of the following disaster recovery tests is the MOST disruptive and comprehensive, involving a complete shutdown of the primary production systems to failover to the DR site?
- Tabletop exercise
- Full interruption test (Correct answer)
- Parallel test
- Simulation test
Correct answer: Full interruption test
A full interruption test is the most thorough and also the most disruptive type of DR test. It involves shutting down the primary systems and actually failing over to the recovery site to validate that the DR plan is effective in a real-world scenario.
Question 4: A company is designing a DR solution with a secondary cloud region. The plan is to replicate only the critical data to the DR region and have the infrastructure defined as code (IaC) templates ready for deployment. In the event of a disaster, the cloud team must first provision the virtual machines, install applications, and then restore the data. This approach prioritizes low cost over recovery speed. Which DR strategy is being implemented?
- Hot site
- Warm standby
- Multi-site active/active
- Pilot light (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Pilot light
The pilot light approach involves replicating data to a DR region and maintaining a minimal, non-active environment with only the most critical core services running (like a database replica). The full infrastructure is provisioned only when a disaster occurs. This strategy balances cost-effectiveness with a faster recovery time than a simple backup-and-restore, but is slower than a warm standby.
Question 5: During a disaster recovery planning meeting, the IT team discusses the process of moving operations back to the primary data center after a disaster has been resolved and the primary site is fully functional again. What is this process called?
- Failback (Correct answer)
- Failover
- Cutover
- Rollback
Correct answer: Failback
Failback is the process of restoring operations to a primary production site after a disaster has been resolved and the original site is brought back online. This occurs after a failover to a secondary DR site has taken place.
Question 6: An organization's disaster recovery plan states that in the event of a primary site failure, a secondary site with pre-installed hardware and software will be used for recovery. However, the most recent data backups from the primary site must be manually loaded and configured on the secondary site's servers before services can be restored. This process is expected to take several hours. Which type of disaster recovery site is this?
- Hot site
- Mobile site
- Cold site
- Warm site (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Warm site
A warm site is a DR location that has network connectivity and the necessary hardware and software pre-installed, but does not have the live production data. Data must be restored from backups, resulting in a recovery time of several hours to a day. It offers a balance between the high cost of a hot site and the long recovery time of a cold site.
An organization determines that its e-commerce application can tolerate a maximum of 4 hours of downtime before causing significant business impact.
In the event of a disaster, the business can accept losing up to 1 hour of transaction data.
Which of the following correctly identifies the organization's requirements?