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CV0-004 Practice Question: Designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for a…
A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for a critical application hosted in a public cloud. The application requires a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. Which of the following DR strategies BEST meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the distinction between 'pilot light' and 'warm standby' — the trap here is that candidates confuse hourly snapshots (pilot light) with continuous replication, failing to recognize that hourly snapshots cannot achieve a 15-minute RPO.
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
✓
Warm standby with continuous data replication.
Warm standby with continuous data replication meets the RTO of 1 hour and RPO of 15 minutes because it maintains a partially scaled-down replica of the production environment that can be quickly scaled up, and continuous replication (e.g., using asynchronous replication or Change Block Tracking) ensures data loss is limited to seconds or minutes, well within the 15-minute RPO.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Backup and restore with daily backups.
Why it's wrong here
Daily backups give an RPO of up to 24 hours, far exceeding the 15-minute requirement, and full restores typically breach the one-hour RTO. It is tempting because backup and restore is cheap and simple, and would be correct where RTO and RPO are measured in days, not minutes.
- ✗
Cold standby with nightly backups.
Why it's wrong here
Nightly backups again yield an RPO approaching 24 hours, and cold standby requires provisioning and booting infrastructure, which can exceed the one-hour RTO. It is tempting because cold standby costs less than warm or hot standby, and would be correct for less critical workloads tolerating day-scale recovery.
- ✗
Pilot light with hourly snapshots.
Why it's wrong here
Hourly snapshots give an RPO of up to 60 minutes, exceeding the 15-minute requirement, and restoring from snapshots typically exceeds the 1-hour RTO. Pilot light suits scenarios with looser RPOs where a minimal core environment is kept running and scaled up on failover.
- ✓
Warm standby with continuous data replication.
Why this is correct
Warm standby with continuous replication keeps a running scaled-down environment and replicates data continuously, giving an RPO near zero and rapid failover within the one-hour RTO. This satisfies both the 15-minute RPO and one-hour RTO constraints.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CV0-004 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 CV0-004 exam.