CISA Practice Question: Information Systems Operations and Business Resilience
An organization uses automated job scheduling for batch processing. A critical job fails due to a dependency on another job that has not completed. Which of the following controls would BEST prevent this issue?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse detective controls (like alerts) with preventive controls, or assume that rerun procedures can prevent the initial failure, when in fact only dependency management addresses the root cause by enforcing execution order.
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
✓
Dependency management
Dependency management is the correct control because it ensures that job scheduling logic explicitly defines and enforces the order of execution based on predecessor/successor relationships. By configuring dependencies (e.g., using job control language (JCL) with COND parameters or scheduling tools like CA Workload Automation ESP), the system will automatically hold a job until all prerequisite jobs have completed successfully, preventing the failure scenario described.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Job failure alerts
Why it's wrong here
Alerts notify after failure, but do not prevent.
- ✗
Manual job scheduling
Why it's wrong here
Manual scheduling is less reliable.
- ✗
Rerun procedures
Why it's wrong here
Rerun is reactive.
- ✓
Dependency management
Why this is correct
Ensures jobs wait for prerequisites.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 995 original CISA practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. 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.