DRI Disaster Recovery Strategies & Techniques 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which DR strategy involves maintaining a fully operational duplicate of the primary site that is always running and can accept failover instantly?
- Warm site
- Hot site (Correct answer)
- Cold site
- Mobile site
Correct answer: Hot site
A hot site is a fully equipped, always-on duplicate facility that enables near-instant failover with minimal data loss.
Question 2: What is the primary purpose of a Tabletop Exercise in disaster recovery?
- To restore actual production systems
- To test backup media integrity
- To walk stakeholders through scenarios in a discussion-based format (Correct answer)
- To measure RTO compliance under live conditions
Correct answer: To walk stakeholders through scenarios in a discussion-based format
A tabletop exercise is a facilitated, discussion-based session where team members review their roles and responses to a hypothetical scenario without activating actual DR systems.
Question 3: In DR planning, 'Maximum Tolerable Downtime' (MTD) is best defined as:
- The time required to restore a system from backup
- The longest period a business function can be unavailable before causing irreversible harm (Correct answer)
- The interval between automated failover checks
- The difference between RTO and RPO
Correct answer: The longest period a business function can be unavailable before causing irreversible harm
MTD defines the upper boundary of acceptable downtime before an organization suffers consequences it cannot recover from, setting the ceiling for RTO.
Question 4: Which technique synchronizes data to a remote site continuously so that the recovery point is essentially zero data loss?
- Asynchronous replication
- Daily full backup
- Synchronous replication (Correct answer)
- Incremental tape backup
Correct answer: Synchronous replication
Synchronous replication writes data to both the primary and secondary sites simultaneously, ensuring zero data divergence and near-zero RPO.
Question 5: A company's RPO is set at 4 hours. What is the MAXIMUM acceptable interval for automated data backups?
- 1 hour
- 4 hours (Correct answer)
- 8 hours
- 24 hours
Correct answer: 4 hours
The backup interval must not exceed the RPO; if RPO is 4 hours, backups must run at least every 4 hours to avoid exceeding allowable data loss.
Question 6: What differentiates a 'reciprocal agreement' DR strategy from a hot site strategy?
- Reciprocal agreements use cloud infrastructure
- Reciprocal agreements involve two organizations agreeing to host each other during a disaster (Correct answer)
- Reciprocal agreements require government approval
- Reciprocal agreements only cover network recovery
Correct answer: Reciprocal agreements involve two organizations agreeing to host each other during a disaster
A reciprocal agreement is a mutual arrangement between two organizations to provide backup processing capacity for each other in the event of a disaster.
Question 7: During a DR test, the team discovers the recovery procedure for the ERP system takes 9 hours but the RTO is 6 hours. What is the BEST immediate action?
- Accept the variance and document it
- Revise the RTO to 9 hours
- Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the recovery procedure to meet the 6-hour RTO (Correct answer)
- Cancel the DR test and restart from scratch
Correct answer: Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the recovery procedure to meet the 6-hour RTO
When a test reveals the recovery time exceeds the RTO, the team must analyze and remove procedural bottlenecks to bring actual recovery time within the agreed RTO.
DRI Disaster Recovery Strategies & Techniques 2
Which DR strategy involves maintaining a fully operational duplicate of the primary site that is always running and can accept failover instantly?