ISC2 CC Practice Question: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Incident Response
An organization's BIA determines that the payroll system has a Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) of 4 hours. The current recovery plan has an RTO of 2 hours and an RPO of 1 hour. What is the maximum Work Recovery Time (WRT) allowed to meet the MTD?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is confusing RTO and WRT, or forgetting that MTD includes both, leading to selecting RTO or MTD directly.
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
✓
2 hours
The Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) is the total time a business process can be unavailable. It is composed of the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) plus the Work Recovery Time (WRT). Given MTD = 4 hours and RTO = 2 hours, WRT = MTD - RTO = 2 hours.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
2 hours
Why this is correct
MTD equals RTO plus WRT. With an MTD of 4 hours and an RTO of 2 hours, the remaining allowance for work recovery is 2 hours. RPO governs data loss, not this calculation, so it does not affect the result.
- ✗
3 hours
Why it's wrong here
Three hours subtracts only the RPO from the MTD, treating data-loss tolerance as recovery time. That arithmetic is tempting because all three values appear in the stem, but WRT is MTD minus RTO, so the RPO is irrelevant to this calculation.
- ✗
4 hours
Why it's wrong here
WRT equals MTD minus RTO, so 4 hours ignores the 2-hour recovery time entirely. Stating the full MTD is tempting because it is the headline figure in the BIA, but WRT is the residual time available after systems are restored, not the total tolerable outage.
- ✗
1 hour
Why it's wrong here
One hour equals the RPO, not the residual time after recovery. Confusing RPO with WRT is tempting because both are one-hour figures in the stem, but WRT is derived from MTD minus RTO, giving 2 hours, and RPO governs data loss tolerance instead.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Key term
Organization
An Organization is a top-level container in Google Cloud that represents your company or entities and serves as the root node for all your cloud resources, policies, and access control.
Key term
Business Continuity Planning
Business Continuity Planning is the process of creating a strategy to keep an organization's essential functions running during and after a major disruption.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISC2 exam blueprint
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.