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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Managing, monitoring and mitigating risk

Brightwater Utilities is preparing its continuity strategy for its billing system. It identifies that the system can be unavailable for at most 6 hours before regulatory penalties apply, and that it can tolerate losing no more than 30 minutes of transaction data. Which statement correctly interprets these two parameters?

The recovery time objective is 6 hours, the maximum tolerable downtime, and the recovery point objective is 30 minutes, the maximum tolerable data loss. Data must therefore be backed up or replicated at least every 30 minutes, so a daily backup would be inadequate.

  1. AThe recovery time objective is 30 minutes and the recovery point objective is 6 hours
  2. BThe recovery time objective is 6 hours and the recovery point objective is 30 minutes, so backups or replication must occur at least every 30 minutesCorrect
  3. CBoth parameters measure data loss, so one daily backup would satisfy them
  4. DBoth parameters measure downtime, so a standby site is unnecessary if staff can work manually

Explanation

The recovery time objective is the maximum tolerable downtime (6 hours). The recovery point objective is the maximum tolerable data loss measured in time (30 minutes), which requires backups or replication at least that frequently. Reversing them is the key error, and a daily backup would breach the 30-minute limit.

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