ISC2 CC Business Continuity, DR & Incident Response Practice Question
A company's primary data center experiences a complete power failure, and operations are shifted to a secondary site. The failover process takes 4 hours, but the recovery point objective (RPO) is set to 1 hour. Which of the following is the most likely consequence of this incident?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the distinction between RPO (data loss tolerance) and RTO (downtime tolerance), and candidates mistakenly assume that a successful failover means no data loss, ignoring the replication lag.
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
✓
Data loss of up to 3 hours occurred.
The RPO of 1 hour means the company can tolerate losing up to 1 hour of data. Since the failover took 4 hours, any data written in the 3 hours before the power failure that had not yet been replicated to the secondary site would be lost. This results in a data loss window of up to 3 hours, exceeding the RPO.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Data loss of up to 3 hours occurred.
Why this is correct
The RPO is 1 hour but failover took 4 hours, causing up to 3 hours of data loss.
- ✗
The failover process was unsuccessful.
Why it's wrong here
Failover succeeded but with data loss beyond RPO.
- ✗
No data loss occurred because the secondary site was available.
Why it's wrong here
Data written during the 4-hour outage is lost if not replicated.
- ✗
The recovery time objective (RTO) was not met.
Why it's wrong here
The RTO is not defined; the problem is data loss beyond RPO.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Security Operations Basics
Key term
Incident
An incident is a security event that violates an organization's policies or threatens its data, systems, or operations, requiring a structured response.
Key term
RPO
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how recent data must be to resume operations after a disruption.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CC practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 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 CC exam.