CISA Practice Question: Information Systems Operations and Business Resilience
In ITIL incident management, which severity level typically indicates a critical incident that severely impacts business operations and requires immediate resolution?
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
✓
P1
P1 (Priority 1) incidents are the highest severity, requiring immediate attention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
P2
Why it's wrong here
P2 denotes a high-priority incident affecting a limited group or degraded service, not a critical business-wide outage. P1 is reserved for critical incidents demanding immediate resolution; P2 is correct when impact is significant but contained.
- ✗
P3
Why it's wrong here
P3 covers moderate incidents with limited business impact and workaround availability, resolved within normal queues. It tempts because it still needs timely handling, but critical, business-severe incidents are classified P1, which triggers immediate escalation and resolution.
- ✓
P1
Why this is correct
P1 is the highest priority classification, reserved for critical incidents causing severe business impact, and carries the shortest response and resolution targets. This matches the stem's requirement for immediate resolution of a critical incident affecting operations.
- ✗
P4
Why it's wrong here
P4 designates low-priority incidents such as minor requests or cosmetic faults, handled during standard hours. It is the correct level for trivial issues, but a critical incident severely impacting operations must be P1, not P4.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 934 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.