CISA Practice Question: Information Systems Operations and Business Resilience
An organization has implemented a business continuity plan (BCP) and disaster recovery plan (DRP). During a recent full interruption test, the IT team discovered that the recovery time objective (RTO) for a critical application was not met. What is the MOST likely reason for this failure?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse RTO with RPO or assume procedural gaps (like missing a tabletop exercise) are the root cause, when the actual failure is a technical capacity limitation at the alternate site.
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
✓
The alternate site did not have adequate processing capacity to handle the workload.
The most likely reason the RTO was not met is that the alternate site lacked sufficient processing capacity to handle the workload. RTO measures the time to restore service availability; if the failover site cannot support the required compute, memory, or I/O throughput, restoration will be delayed or fail outright. This is a common capacity planning failure in DR testing, where the alternate site is sized for minimal operations but not for the full production load.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The recovery point objective (RPO) was set too low, causing data loss.
Why it's wrong here
RPO relates to data loss, not the time to recover (RTO).
- ✗
The backup data was not encrypted, leading to corruption during restoration.
Why it's wrong here
Encryption does not typically cause delays; corruption could, but it is less common than capacity issues.
- ✗
The tabletop exercise was not conducted before the full interruption test.
Why it's wrong here
While tabletop exercises are valuable, their absence does not directly cause RTO failure; the root cause is typically technical or procedural.
- ✓
The alternate site did not have adequate processing capacity to handle the workload.
Why this is correct
Insufficient capacity at the alternate site directly impacts recovery time and is a frequent finding in full interruption tests.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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