CISA Governance and Management of IT Practice Question
An IT manager is reviewing the service level agreements (SLAs) for a cloud-based email service. The SLA guarantees 99.9% uptime per month. The service experienced an outage of 45 minutes in a 30-day month. Did the service meet the SLA?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates may incorrectly round 43.2 minutes to 43 minutes and then assume 45 minutes is close enough, or they may mistakenly think 0.1% of a month is 30 minutes, leading them to choose option C.
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
✓
No, because the allowed downtime for 99.9% uptime is approximately 43 minutes.
The SLA guarantees 99.9% uptime per month. For a 30-day month (43,200 minutes), 99.9% uptime allows only 0.1% downtime, which is 43.2 minutes. The actual outage of 45 minutes exceeds this threshold, so the SLA was not met. Option D correctly identifies the allowed downtime as approximately 43 minutes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Yes, because 45 minutes is within 0.1% of the total time.
Why it's wrong here
45 minutes exceeds the permitted 0.1% monthly downtime: 0.1% of 43,200 minutes is 43.2 minutes, so the outage breached the SLA. The tempting reasoning treats 45 minutes as trivially small, which suits casual availability estimates rather than contractual percentage calculations.
- ✗
Yes, because the SLA is calculated per day, not per month.
Why it's wrong here
The SLA explicitly states 99.9% uptime per month, so daily calculation is irrelevant; 45 minutes against 43,200 monthly minutes breaches the threshold. Per-day measurement would be tempting for granular monitoring dashboards, but the contract's stated monthly window governs compliance.
- ✗
No, because any downtime exceeding 30 minutes is a violation.
Why it's wrong here
The 99.9% monthly allowance is roughly 43 minutes in a 30-day month, so a 45-minute outage breaches it, but the stated 30-minute threshold is invented and not derived from the SLA. It is tempting because the conclusion is right, yet the reasoning must compute the permitted downtime from the percentage.
- ✓
No, because the allowed downtime for 99.9% uptime is approximately 43 minutes.
Why this is correct
99.9% uptime permits 0.1% downtime; in a 30-day month (43,200 minutes) that equals about 43.2 minutes. The 45-minute outage exceeds this allowance, so the SLA was breached, confirming the service did not meet its monthly commitment.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This CISA question is part of Courseiva's 934-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 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.