ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)Business Continuity (BC), Disaster Recovery (DR) & Incident Response (IR) ConceptsHard
A financial institution requires its core banking system to have near-instantaneous recovery capabilities with virtually no data loss. Which backup and recovery strategy would BEST meet these stringent requirements?
- ADaily full backups to tape with offsite storage.
- BMonthly differential backups to a cloud storage provider.
- CContinuous data replication to a hot site with automated failover.
- DWeekly incremental backups to disk with occasional restoration tests.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Continuous data replication to a hot site with automated failover.
Continuous data replication to a hot site with automated failover provides the closest to near-instantaneous recovery and virtually no data loss (RPO near zero), which is essential for critical financial systems. Other options involve significant RTO and RPO.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Tape backups have high RTO and RPO due to manual handling and restoration time.
- B. Monthly differential backups result in an unacceptably high RPO (up to a month's data) for a financial institution.
- D. Weekly incremental backups lead to a high RPO (up to a week's data loss) and higher RTO for restoration.
Continuous Data Replication (CDR)
A backup strategy that captures and replicates every change to data as it occurs, ensuring that the recovery site always has an up-to-date copy of the data, minimizing data loss.
- Achieves near-zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
- Often paired with hot sites for rapid Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
- Resource-intensive but critical for high-availability systems.
Memory trick: Replication: Reaching Perfection, Live And Continuously.