ISC2 CC Business Continuity, DR & Incident Response Practice Question
Which metric is used to define the maximum amount of data loss an organization can tolerate during a disaster?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the distinction between RTO and RPO, where candidates mistakenly select RTO because they confuse 'time to recover' with 'time of data loss' — remember RTO is about downtime, RPO is about data loss.
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
✓
RPO
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, such as seconds, minutes, or hours. It determines the age of the backup or replication data that must be restored to resume normal operations after a disaster. For example, an RPO of 1 hour means the organization can tolerate losing up to 1 hour's worth of data.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
RTO
Why it's wrong here
RTO is the target recovery time.
- ✓
RPO
Why this is correct
RPO defines the maximum acceptable data loss.
- ✗
SLA
Why it's wrong here
SLA is a service contract commitment.
- ✗
MTBF
Why it's wrong here
MTBF is a reliability metric.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Security Operations Basics
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.
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.
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JA
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.