hardMultiple Choice
CAS-004 Practice Question: An organization's business continuity plan (BCP)…
An organization's business continuity plan (BCP) includes a recovery time objective (RTO) of 4 hours for its critical ERP system. During a disaster, the system is restored in 5 hours. Which of the following is the MOST significant impact?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the distinction between RTO and RPO, where candidates confuse exceeding the RTO with affecting the RPO, but the trap here is that the most significant impact is the business downtime and contractual penalties, not the technical recovery steps or insurance costs.
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
✓
Unacceptable business downtime and potential contractual penalties
The RTO of 4 hours defines the maximum acceptable downtime for the ERP system. Restoring it in 5 hours exceeds this threshold, resulting in unacceptable business downtime. This can trigger contractual penalties if service-level agreements (SLAs) specify a 4-hour RTO, as the organization failed to meet its recovery commitment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Unacceptable business downtime and potential contractual penalties
Why this is correct
Exceeding the four-hour RTO by one hour means the ERP system was unavailable beyond the maximum tolerable outage the business agreed, so operations and contractual service commitments were breached. The impact is measured against the RTO constraint itself, not the recovery cost or data loss.
- ✗
Need to reroute network traffic to the DR site
Why it's wrong here
Rerouting traffic is a recovery step, not the impact of exceeding the 4-hour RTO; the overrun itself breaches the agreed recovery time. It is tempting because DR failover commonly involves redirecting traffic, and that would be a valid concern had the restore completed within the target window.
- ✗
Higher cost for cyber insurance premiums
Why it's wrong here
Insurance premiums are a downstream commercial consequence, not the direct operational impact of missing the 4-hour RTO; the breach itself is the missed recovery deadline. It is tempting because repeated RTO failures can eventually affect premiums, but that is speculative and secondary to the recovery-time breach.
- ✗
Increased recovery point objective (RPO) for the last backup
Why it's wrong here
RPO measures tolerable data loss between the last backup and the failure, and is unaffected by how long restoration takes; the 5-hour restore breaches RTO, not RPO. It is tempting because both metrics appear in a BCP, and RPO would be the relevant measure if backups were stale.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This CAS-005 question is part of Courseiva's 973-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CAS-005 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 CAS-005 exam.