SY0-701 Security Operations Practice Question
Exhibit
ERP database protection summary: - Required RTO: 2 hours - Required RPO: 15 minutes - Current backup schedule: * Full backup every Sunday at 01:00 * Differential backup daily at 01:00 * Transaction log backup every 30 minutes - Estimated restore time from backup media: 90 minutes after media is available - No standby server exists - Restore testing occurs once per year
Based on the exhibit, which change best moves the ERP recovery design toward meeting both recovery targets?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often think increasing backup frequency (Option A) is sufficient to meet recovery targets, but they overlook that backups alone do not reduce RTO and that a warm standby with log shipping is required for near-zero RPO and fast failover.
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
✓
Add a warm standby database with 15-minute log shipping and scheduled failover tests.
Adding a warm standby database with 15-minute log shipping significantly reduces the recovery point objective (RPO) to near-zero and, combined with scheduled failover tests, ensures the recovery time objective (RTO) is met. This directly addresses the gap between the current backup-only approach and the required recovery targets, as log shipping provides near-continuous data protection and failover testing validates the recovery process.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the full backup frequency to every night and keep the same recovery process.
Why it's wrong here
Nightly full backups only cap data loss at 24 hours, which still violates the 15-minute RPO target. The recovery process remains a cold rebuild from media—restoring the full backup and then replaying transaction logs—so the RTO stays high. This option increases restore depth but does not provision a standby system or reduce the time to operational readiness.
- ✓
Add a warm standby database with 15-minute log shipping and scheduled failover tests.
Why this is correct
A warm standby reduces recovery time because the system is already provisioned and closer to operational readiness. Pairing it with 15-minute log shipping also improves the recovery point objective by limiting data loss. Scheduled failover tests validate that the process works in practice, which is critical when tight RTO and RPO targets must both be met.
- ✗
Move backup media to the same server to reduce transfer time.
Why it's wrong here
Moving backup media onto the production server removes off-site redundancy and exposes the only backup copy to the same hardware failure, power loss, or ransomware event that could take down the database. Backup transfer time is rarely the dominant factor in recovery; the bottleneck is usually applying logs and rebuilding the database, so this change worsens resilience without meaningfully improving either RTO or RPO.
- ✗
Eliminate differential backups and rely only on weekly full backups.
Why it's wrong here
Eliminating differential backups forces every recovery to start from a weekly full backup and then apply all transaction log backups generated over the entire week, drastically extending recovery time and increasing the chance of log-related failures. Differential backups store only changes since the last full backup, so removing them would force the restore to replay far more transactions, making both the RTO and RPO targets impossible to meet.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Incident Response Process
Key term
RPO
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how recent data must be to resume operations after a disruption.
Key term
Business Continuity Planning
Business Continuity Planning is the process of creating a strategy to keep an organization's essential functions running during and after a major disruption.
About these practice questions
This SY0-701 question is part of Courseiva's 1,013-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 SY0-701 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 SY0-701 exam.