CISA Governance and Management of IT Practice Question
A financial services company is migrating its core banking system to a public cloud to improve scalability and reduce costs. The project is high-risk due to regulatory compliance requirements (e.g., data residency, audit trails). The IT governance committee has reviewed the project plan and finds that the risk assessment is incomplete – it does not address the potential impact of a cloud provider outage on critical transactions. The committee must approve the project or request changes. The project manager argues that the cloud provider's SLA guarantees 99.99% uptime and that additional controls would delay the project. What should the governance committee do?
⚠ Common exam trap
CISA often tests the misconception that a strong SLA eliminates the need for contingency planning, but governance requires assessing residual risk and ensuring business continuity even with contractual guarantees.
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
✓
Request a revised risk assessment that includes contingency plans for provider outages.
The governance committee's role is to ensure that risks are identified, assessed, and mitigated before approving a high-risk project. An incomplete risk assessment that ignores the impact of a cloud provider outage on critical banking transactions is a material gap. Requesting a revised risk assessment with contingency plans directly addresses this gap while allowing the project to proceed responsibly. This aligns with CISA's emphasis on risk-based decision-making and IT governance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Reject the project and require the system to remain on-premises.
Why it's wrong here
Mandating on-premises residency discards the scalability and cost objectives without analysing the identified gap, and the committee's remit is to request changes, not to veto cloud outright. Retaining on-premises is valid where data residency or latency requirements genuinely cannot be met by any public cloud region.
- ✓
Request a revised risk assessment that includes contingency plans for provider outages.
Why this is correct
The SLA covers provider uptime, not the bank's regulatory obligation to plan for outage impact on critical transactions. Requesting contingency planning in the risk assessment satisfies the incomplete-assessment constraint before approval, rather than accepting the SLA as sufficient mitigation.
- ✗
Approve the project based on the provider's strong SLA.
Why it's wrong here
An SLA credit does not transfer or mitigate the unassessed outage impact on critical transactions, so the incomplete risk assessment remains unaddressed. Accepting a provider's uptime guarantee is legitimate when the residual risk has been analysed and formally accepted by the business owners against defined tolerance.
- ✗
Approve a pilot migration for non-critical systems first.
Why it's wrong here
Piloting non-critical systems does not complete the risk assessment for the core banking migration, so the outage impact on critical transactions stays unquantified. A pilot is appropriate when validating technical feasibility or migration tooling before full cutover, once the risk analysis itself is complete.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISACA exam blueprint
This CISA practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA 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 CISA exam.