Question

Difficulty: MediumBusiness Impact Analysis and Business Continuity Management

A regional financial institution conducts a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for its core wire-transfer processing gateway. The assessment determines that to avoid regulatory non-compliance fines, the service must be fully operational and accessible within 3 hours following an unplanned outage. Additionally, the risk assessment establishes that the organization can tolerate a maximum of 5 minutes of lost transaction data updates. Which of the following correctly classifies these business continuity targets?

  1. A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 3 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutesAnswer
  2. B
    A Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 3 hours and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 5 minutes
  3. C
    A Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of 3 hours and a Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) of 5 minutes
  4. D
    A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 5 minutes and a Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) of 3 hours

Answer

A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 3 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes correctly define the service restoration and data loss constraints specified in the BIA.
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines the maximum allowable time that a business process or IT system can remain offline following a disruption (3 hours). The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time (5 minutes). Therefore, the option specifying an RTO of 3 hours and an RPO of 5 minutes correctly reflects the scenario specifications.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the target restoration timeframe for the system service.
The requirement that the wire-transfer service must be fully restored within 3 hours measures acceptable service downtime, which defines the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
RTO represents the maximum targeted duration of time between failure and service restoration.
2
Identify the allowable data loss threshold for transaction logs.
The requirement that at most 5 minutes of data update loss can be tolerated defines the Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
RPO measures the maximum acceptable age of unrecoverable data resulting from an interruption.

Key Concept

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) vs. Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
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