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ISC2 CC Practice Question: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Incident Response
During a BIA, the maximum tolerable downtime for a critical application is determined to be 4 hours. The IT team estimates system recovery will take 2 hours, but additional manual work to reconcile data will take 1 hour. What is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?
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
RTO is the time within which systems must be recovered to avoid unacceptable consequences. Here, the system must be back within 2 hours to meet the 4-hour MTD, but recovery includes both system restoration and work recovery. The RTO is typically the time to restore systems to a functional state, which is 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.
- ✗
1 hour
Why it's wrong here
This is the work recovery time, not the RTO.
- ✓
2 hours
Why this is correct
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines the targeted duration for restoring a business function or application to an operational state after an outage. In this scenario, the IT team estimates system recovery will take 2 hours. This timeframe directly represents the RTO, as it signifies when the critical application itself becomes available again. The additional manual data reconciliation, while crucial for full data integrity, occurs after the system is operational and does not extend the RTO, which must satisfy the 4-hour Maximum Tolerable Downtime.
- ✗
4 hours
Why it's wrong here
This is the maximum tolerable downtime (MTD), not the RTO.
- ✗
3 hours
Why it's wrong here
This includes work recovery time, but RTO is typically only for system restoration.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Key term
Recovery
Recovery is the process of restoring systems, data, and operations after a security incident, failure, or disaster to return to normal functioning.
Key term
RTO
Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable time to restore a system or data after a disaster, defining how quickly normal operations must resume.
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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.