CISA Practice Question: Information Systems Operations and Business Resilience
An organization is conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Which of the following metrics defines the maximum acceptable outage time for a critical business process?
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
✓
Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)
Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) is the total time a process can be disrupted without causing significant business damage.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Why it's wrong here
RPO defines acceptable data loss, not outage duration.
- ✓
Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)
Why this is correct
Correct. MTD is the maximum outage the business can tolerate.
- ✗
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Why it's wrong here
RTO is the target time to resume operations, not the maximum acceptable.
- ✗
Work Recovery Time (WRT)
Why it's wrong here
WRT is the time needed after recovery to return to normal operations.
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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.