Operations & Continuity Practice Questions

Answers and explanations appear when you work through the set above.

1. Which control BEST detects unauthorized drift from an approved server configuration baseline?

   • Configuration monitoring against the approved baseline.
   • A full backup performed after every approved change.
   • Job rotation for system administrators.
   • A disaster recovery tabletop exercise.

2. A database administrator needs access to customer records to maintain indexes but does not need to view the records. Which principle should guide the access design?

   • Mandatory vacation
   • Separation of duties
   • Need-to-know
   • Job rotation

3. A payment process requires one employee to create a vendor and another to approve the first payment. What is the primary security objective of this design?

   • Reduce the amount of data lost between backups.
   • Ensure that each employee can perform the entire process during an outage.
   • Detect configuration drift on the payment server.
   • Reduce the opportunity for one person to commit and conceal fraud.

4. A team performs a full backup on Sunday and incremental backups on Monday through Wednesday. To restore Wednesday's data, which sequence is normally required?

   • Only Wednesday's incremental backup.
   • The Sunday full backup followed in order by the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday incrementals.
   • The Sunday full backup followed by Wednesday's incremental backup only.
   • Monday's incremental backup followed by Tuesday and Wednesday's incremental backups.

5. A business impact analysis states that a service must be restored within 90 minutes, and the business can tolerate no more than four hours of outage. Which statement is MOST accurate?

   • The RTO is four hours, with a maximum tolerable downtime of 90 minutes.
   • The RPO is 90 minutes and the WRT is four hours.
   • The RTO is 90 minutes and maximum tolerable downtime is four hours.
   • The WRT is 90 minutes and the RPO is four hours.

6. An organization has an RPO of 15 minutes for a critical transaction system. Which backup strategy BEST supports that objective?

   • A weekly full backup kept at the primary facility, with daily checks that the tape remains readable.
   • A monthly transaction archive copied to removable media for long-term retention
   • A daily differential backup retained offsite, with no replication between backups
   • Frequent replication to protected copies recoverable after site failure.

7. A company needs an alternate facility that already has operating systems, current data, and network connectivity, with minimal setup before production can resume. Which site type is the BEST fit?

   • Hot site
   • Cold site
   • Mobile site
   • Warm site

8. Which DR exercise provides the strongest evidence of failover capability while the primary production environment continues serving users?

   • Read-through exercise
   • A parallel test at the recovery site while production stays operational.
   • A full-interruption test that shuts down the primary environment before recovery begins.
   • Checklist review by the plan owner.

9. A privileged administrator has sole control of a sensitive process and refuses to take scheduled leave. What is the MOST appropriate management response?

   • Grant the administrator broader privileges so coverage is unnecessary.
   • Disable all backups until the administrator returns.
   • Require mandatory vacation or an independent absence review, verifying the process during absence.
   • Replace the approved configuration baseline with the administrator's personal procedure and defer independent review.