A hospital network completes a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for its critical electronic health records (EHR) database. The BIA determines that patient care workflows can tolerate a maximum system outage of 4 hours before safety is severely compromised. However, to prevent clinical record corruption and medication errors, the hospital can sustain a maximum of 15 minutes of unrecoverable transactional data loss. When configuring the disaster recovery architecture, which threshold specifically dictates the required database backup/replication frequency, and what is its correct definition?
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which defines the maximum acceptable period of data loss measured in time.Answer
- BRecovery Time Objective (RTO), which defines the maximum acceptable period of data loss measured in time.
- CRecovery Point Objective (RPO), which defines the maximum duration systems can remain offline before normal operations resume.
- DMaximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD), which acts as a detective security control governing automated database replication schedules.
Answer
The threshold that dictates database replication frequency is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which defines the maximum acceptable period of data loss measured in time.
The correct answer identifies Recovery Point Objective (RPO) as the metric defining the maximum acceptable period of data loss measured in time. In the scenario, the 15-minute data loss constraint specifies the RPO, meaning database synchronizations or backups must occur at least every 15 minutes so that an unexpected failure results in no more than 15 minutes of missing records.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) vs. Recovery Time Objective (RTO)