220-1102 Operational Procedures Practice Question
A technician is part of a Change Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. The team is discussing a proposed change to update the antivirus software on all company servers. The change has a high risk of incompatibility. According to change management best practices, what should the technician recommend as a key part of the change request?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse a communication or escalation procedure (like a notification list or escalation plan) with the technical rollback strategy required for high-risk changes, leading candidates to overlook the backout plan as the critical component.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
A backout plan
A backout plan is essential for high-risk changes like an antivirus update that could cause incompatibility. It provides a predefined, step-by-step process to revert the system to its previous state if the change fails, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. Without a backout plan, the organization risks prolonged outages or data loss if the update breaks critical server functionality.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
A backout plan
Why this is correct
A backout plan is the correct artifact for a CAB meeting because it defines the specific, pre-approved sequence of actions required to reverse a change if implementation fails or causes unexpected service degradation. This plan typically includes rollback commands, configuration snapshots, data restoration procedures, and the conditions that trigger the rollback, ensuring the team can rapidly return the environment to its previous stable state without improvisation. In the context of change management, a backout plan directly mitigates the primary risk of a change—the inability to recover from failure—and is therefore a required component of a change request for critical systems.
- ✗
An escalation plan
Why it's wrong here
An escalation plan is incorrect because it addresses the communication and decision-making hierarchy during a failed or problematic change, specifying who to contact, when, and with what authority, rather than providing technical steps to undo the change itself. While escalation is important for coordinating incident response, it does not restore the system to its prior configuration, so it cannot serve as a mechanism to reverse a change. For example, a database schema migration that corrupts data cannot be fixed by escalating to a manager; only a backout strategy can revert the schema and restore the data.
- ✗
A notification list
Why it's wrong here
A notification list is incorrect because it simply enumerates stakeholders—such as end users, IT support, and management—who must be informed about a change schedule, progress, or outage, but it contains no operational procedures to reverse the change. Its purpose is to manage expectations and coordinate awareness, not to address the technical risk of failure or provide a recovery path. Even a comprehensive notification list with detailed contact information leaves the system in a broken state if the change fails, highlighting that it is fundamentally a communication tool rather than a mitigation control.
- ✗
A cost analysis
Why it's wrong here
A cost analysis is incorrect because it evaluates the financial implications of a change, including implementation expenses, resource costs, and potential return on investment, which is a business consideration rather than a technical recovery mechanism. While understanding cost is useful for approving whether a change is worth pursuing, it does not provide any instructions for undoing the change if something goes wrong during or after deployment. For instance, knowing that a failed operating system patch costs $5,000 in downtime does not restore the previous operating system; only a backout plan containing actual rollback procedures can do that.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Fire Suppression Systems in Data Center
Key term
Antivirus
Antivirus is software that detects, prevents, and removes malicious software (malware) from a computer or network.
Key term
Change management
Change management is the structured process of planning, approving, implementing, and reviewing changes to IT systems to minimize risk and disruption.
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Same concept, more angles
2 more ways this is tested on 220-1102
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A technician is implementing a change to a server's network configuration. After making the change, he verifies that connectivity works, but a critical application on another server stops functioning. According to change management best practices, what should the technician have done first?
medium- A.Notified all users of the change
- B.Tested the change in a lab environment
- ✓ C.Created a rollback plan
- D.Obtained emergency change approval
Why C: Change management best practices require creating a rollback plan before implementing any change, even a seemingly simple network configuration change. The rollback plan ensures that if the change causes unexpected issues—such as a critical application on another server failing due to a misconfigured subnet, routing table, or firewall rule—the technician can quickly revert to the previous state without extended downtime. In this scenario, verifying connectivity alone does not guarantee that dependent services or applications remain unaffected, so a pre-defined rollback plan is essential.
Variation 2. A technician is tasked with implementing a change to update the antivirus software on all company workstations. The change has been approved by the CAB. The technician plans to deploy the update via a centralized management console. During the deployment, the technician notices that some older workstations are failing to install the update. Which of the following should the technician do FIRST?
hard- A.A) Continue deploying to remaining workstations and address failures later.
- B.B) Roll back the change on all workstations immediately.
- ✓ C.C) Stop the deployment and consult the change management plan for a backout strategy.
- D.D) Manually install the update on the failing workstations using a USB drive.
Why C: The technician must first stop the deployment to prevent further failures and then consult the change management plan for the documented backout strategy. This aligns with the change management process, which requires a rollback plan to be approved before implementation. Continuing or manually fixing without consulting the plan risks violating the approved change procedure and could cause additional issues.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1102 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1102 exam.