ISC2 CC Business Continuity, DR & Incident Response Practice Question
Your organization runs a critical e-commerce platform on a private cloud. The database server is located in a data center in a seismic zone. The current DR plan uses a warm site with daily differential backups and a 12-hour RTO. A recent earthquake caused a power outage but no physical damage. The database corruption was discovered after 6 hours. The backups from last night are intact but restoring involves applying transaction logs. The RTO is now at risk. What should be done FIRST?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the misconception that point-in-time recovery or full backup restoration is always the safest first step, but in a time-critical DR scenario with intact differential backups, the fastest recovery path is to restore the latest differential backup to meet 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
✓
Initiate the warm site recovery by restoring the latest differential backup onto standby servers.
The immediate priority is to restore the latest differential backup onto the warm site's standby servers. This approach minimizes recovery time by applying only the changes since the last full backup, directly addressing the RTO risk. The warm site is already prepared, and restoring the differential backup is the fastest path to operational readiness without the overhead of full backup restoration or log replay.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Fail over to the warm site immediately without data restoration.
Why it's wrong here
Data loss would be unacceptable.
- ✗
Perform a point-in-time recovery using the last full backup and all transaction logs.
Why it's wrong here
Requires full backup first, slower.
- ✓
Initiate the warm site recovery by restoring the latest differential backup onto standby servers.
Why this is correct
Fastest recovery option given the warm site setup.
- ✗
Restore the last full backup and then apply all subsequent differential and log backups.
Why it's wrong here
Takes longer than restoring only the differential backup.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Risk Management and Security Controls
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
Recovery
Recovery is the process of restoring systems, data, and operations after a security incident, failure, or disaster to return to normal functioning.
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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.