ISC Contingency Management Practice Question
During a BCP planning session, the executive team is debating the 'Maximum Tolerable Downtime' (MTD) for a legacy internal application. What is the correct way to define this metric?
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
✓
The total duration of time that an organization can tolerate a business process being unavailable.
MTD is the total time a process can be down before the organization suffers catastrophic/irreversible harm.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The maximum acceptable age of data in the event of a system crash.
Why it's wrong here
This is the RPO.
- ✗
The time taken to fail over to the secondary site during a disaster.
Why it's wrong here
This is the RTO, not the MTD.
- ✗
The time required to restore the application from the latest tape backup.
Why it's wrong here
This is a technical recovery time, not a business-defined constraint.
- ✓
The total duration of time that an organization can tolerate a business process being unavailable.
Why this is correct
MTD represents the upper limit of downtime tolerance before irreversible business impact occurs.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed August 2026 · checked against the official (ISC)² exam blueprint
This ISC practice question is part of Courseiva's free (ISC)² 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 ISC exam.