DRI Technology Recovery Procedures 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: When prioritizing system recovery during a disaster, which factor should be weighted most heavily?
- Cost of the system
- Age of the technology
- Criticality to core business functions (Correct answer)
- Number of users on the system
Correct answer: Criticality to core business functions
Recovery prioritization should be driven by criticality to core business operations, ensuring the most essential systems are restored first to minimize business impact.
Question 2: What is a technology recovery 'dependency map' used for?
- Tracking software license expiration dates
- Identifying interconnections between systems so recovery is sequenced correctly (Correct answer)
- Mapping physical server rack locations
- Documenting network cable layouts
Correct answer: Identifying interconnections between systems so recovery is sequenced correctly
A dependency map illustrates how systems rely on each other, enabling recovery teams to restore systems in the correct order to avoid cascading failures.
Question 3: Which cloud deployment model is most commonly used to provide rapid scalability during a disaster recovery activation?
- Private cloud only
- On-premises virtualization
- Public cloud (IaaS) (Correct answer)
- Legacy mainframe hosting
Correct answer: Public cloud (IaaS)
Public cloud IaaS allows organizations to rapidly provision compute and storage resources on demand during DR activation without capital investment in standby hardware.
Question 4: A company discovers that its DR backups are stored in the same building as the primary data center. What risk does this create?
- Slower restore times
- The same physical disaster could destroy both production data and backups simultaneously (Correct answer)
- Higher bandwidth consumption
- Increased licensing costs
Correct answer: The same physical disaster could destroy both production data and backups simultaneously
Co-locating backups with the primary data center means a fire, flood, or physical disaster at that location could eliminate both production data and all recovery copies.
Question 5: In database recovery, what is the purpose of transaction logs?
- To store user authentication credentials
- To record all database changes, enabling point-in-time recovery (Correct answer)
- To optimize query performance
- To archive old records automatically
Correct answer: To record all database changes, enabling point-in-time recovery
Transaction logs record every change made to a database, allowing recovery teams to replay transactions and restore the database to any specific point in time.
Question 6: What is the purpose of a 'recovery time actual' (RTA) measurement?
- To set the target recovery window before a disaster
- To measure how long recovery actually took during a test or real event (Correct answer)
- To calculate backup storage requirements
- To estimate the financial loss per hour of downtime
Correct answer: To measure how long recovery actually took during a test or real event
RTA documents the actual time taken to recover systems during a test or real disaster, which is then compared against the RTO to identify gaps.
Question 7: Which approach best supports achieving a near-zero RPO for a critical database?
- Daily tape backups
- Weekly full backups
- Synchronous replication to a remote site (Correct answer)
- Monthly disaster recovery testing
Correct answer: Synchronous replication to a remote site
Synchronous replication writes data to both the primary and remote replica simultaneously, ensuring near-zero data loss if the primary site fails.
DRI Technology Recovery Procedures 3
When prioritizing system recovery during a disaster, which factor should be weighted most heavily?