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CCSP Practice Question: A cloud security engineer is designing a disaster…
A cloud security engineer is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on virtual machines. The RTO is 4 hours and RPO is 1 hour. Which approach meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the distinction between RPO and RTO, and the trap here is that candidates confuse asynchronous replication with a 1-hour lag as meeting both requirements, overlooking that a cold standby without pre-provisioned compute cannot achieve a 4-hour RTO even if the data is available.
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
✓
Keep a warm standby in another region with continuous data replication.
Meets both the RTO of 4 hours and RPO of 1 hour by maintaining a warm standby in another region with continuous data replication. Continuous replication ensures data is synchronized with minimal lag (well under 1 hour), and the warm standby VM can be activated quickly to meet the 4-hour RTO. This approach balances cost and recovery speed, as a warm standby is partially running and can be promoted to production faster than a cold standby.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Take daily snapshots and restore to a different region.
Why it's wrong here
Daily snapshots exceed the 1-hour RPO.
- ✗
Use synchronous replication to a secondary availability zone.
Why it's wrong here
Synchronous replication is expensive and may not cover regional failures.
- ✓
Keep a warm standby in another region with continuous data replication.
Why this is correct
Warm standby with continuous replication meets both RTO and RPO.
- ✗
Use asynchronous replication with a 1-hour lag to a secondary site.
Why it's wrong here
Asynchronous replication may still lose data, and RPO is not guaranteed.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CCSP 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 CCSP exam.