Question

Difficulty: MediumBusiness Impact Analysis and Business Continuity Management

An enterprise security team completes a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for a SaaS-based customer billing platform. The assessment indicates that the organization can tolerate losing a maximum of 15 minutes of transaction data during a catastrophic database outage. However, restoring full system functionality and verifying data consistency must occur within 6 hours to avoid regulatory fines. Which of the following metrics represents the maximum allowable 15-minute data loss threshold?

  1. A
    Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
  2. Recovery Point Objective (RPO)Answer
  3. C
    Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)
  4. D
    Corrective Control Metric

Answer

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) specifies the maximum acceptable age of data backups or transaction logs when an outage occurs. In this scenario, defining a maximum allowable loss of 15 minutes of transaction data directly corresponds to the RPO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the operational recovery constraints provided in the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) scenario.
Identified two recovery parameters: a data loss limit of 15 minutes and a system restoration limit of 6 hours.
Differentiating data loss limits from system restoration timeframes is essential for applying correct continuity metrics.
2
Map the 15-minute data loss constraint to standard business continuity terms.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) explicitly designates the maximum tolerable data loss measured backward in time from the moment of failure.
RPO establishes database backup frequencies and transaction logging requirements.

Key Concept

Business Impact Analysis Metrics (RPO vs RTO)
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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