Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)Cloud Security OperationsHard
A cloud security team is establishing a robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan for a critical application that processes real-time financial transactions. The application has a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours. Which of the following data backup and recovery strategies is most suitable for meeting both of these objectives?
- ADaily full backups to object storage.
- BSnapshot-based backups every 6 hours.
- CContinuous data replication to a secondary region.
- DHourly incremental backups with daily full backups.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Continuous data replication to a secondary region.
Continuous data replication (often asynchronous) to a secondary region can achieve an RPO of 15 minutes or less and supports an RTO of 4 hours by allowing systems to be brought online quickly in the secondary region.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Daily full backups would result in an RPO of up to 24 hours (much higher than 15 minutes).
- B. Snapshot-based backups every 6 hours would result in an RPO of up to 6 hours, far exceeding the 15-minute requirement.
- D. Hourly incremental backups would result in an RPO of up to 1 hour, which is greater than the required 15 minutes.
Continuous Data Replication (CDR)
A disaster recovery strategy that continuously copies data changes from a primary location to a secondary location, ensuring that the secondary site is always nearly identical to the primary, resulting in very low RPO.
- Achieves very low RPO (seconds to minutes).
- Can be synchronous or asynchronous.
- Often paired with active-passive or active-active DR strategies.
Memory trick: Continuous replication is like having a twin, always up-to-date.