ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)Business Continuity (BC), Disaster Recovery (DR) & Incident Response (IR) ConceptsHard
During a routine audit, it is discovered that an organization's critical database, which processes customer transactions, has been operating without redundant systems for failover. The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for this database indicates an MTD of 4 hours. Which of the following would be the MOST appropriate immediate action to reduce the risk of exceeding the MTD during an unforeseen outage?
- ANegotiate a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the database vendor for faster support.
- BUpdate the incident response plan to include manual database restoration steps.
- CDeploy a clustered database solution with automatic failover.
- DImplement daily full backups to an offsite tape drive.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Deploy a clustered database solution with automatic failover.
Given an MTD of 4 hours for a critical database, implementing a clustered database solution with automatic failover (redundant systems) directly addresses the need for high availability and rapid recovery, minimizing downtime to potentially minutes or seconds, well within the 4-hour MTD. The other options either do not provide a sufficiently fast recovery or are reactive measures.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. An SLA for faster support is reactive; it doesn't prevent downtime or automatically restore service, only expedites external assistance.
- B. Updating the incident response plan is good for documentation, but manual steps are unlikely to meet a 4-hour MTD for a critical database.
- D. While important for RPO, daily backups do not guarantee recovery within a 4-hour RTO/MTD for the entire system, especially for a database.
Redundant Systems
Duplicate hardware, software, or network components designed to provide continuous service in the event of a primary system failure, ensuring high availability and rapid failover.
- Eliminates single points of failure
- Ensures high availability and fault tolerance
- Critical for meeting low RTOs and MTDs
Memory trick: Redundancy is the key to always be Ready, Even when things go down.