CCSP - Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Security (17% of the exam) - Section 3.5
Plan business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR).
Business continuity and disaster recovery strategy, risks in the cloud environment, business requirements including RTO, RPO and recovery service level, and creation, implementation and testing of the plan.
recovery time objective (RTO)recovery point objective (RPO)recovery service levelbusiness impact analysisBC/DR plan testing
Practice question for this objective
lock_openFree sampleCloud Platform and Infrastructure Securitymedium
A retailer operating a hybrid cloud runs its order-management system across an on-premises private cloud and a public IaaS provider. During a disaster recovery test, the recovery site restores the application within the recovery time objective, but a downstream payment-integration service is still unavailable because its own dependency was never mapped. What is the most important improvement to the continuity programme this reveals?
AThe recovery time objective for the order-management system should be shortened to force faster restoration.
BThe recovery point objective should be relaxed to reduce the volume of data replicated during failover.
CThe business impact analysis must capture upstream and downstream dependencies so that recovery sequencing restores interdependent services together.check_circle Correct
DThe payment-integration service should be moved entirely on-premises to remove it from the recovery scope.
Use the business impact analysis to map service interdependencies so recovery sequencing restores every critical component. A recovery plan is only as complete as the dependency map behind it. When a met RTO still leaves a dependent service down, the gap is in the BIA's dependency analysis, which must feed the order in which services are recovered.
Why A is wrong: The RTO for the primary system was already met, so tightening it does nothing to address the unmapped downstream service that caused the gap.
Why B is wrong: The problem was an availability gap in a dependent service, not excessive data replication, so changing the RPO neither explains nor fixes the observed failure.
Why C is correct: The failure is a missed dependency, which the BIA is meant to identify; mapping interdependencies ensures the recovery plan restores services in an order that leaves no critical component stranded.
Why D is wrong: Relocating the service does not address the root cause, which is that its dependency was never analysed; the same blind spot would recur wherever it runs.
Exam traps in Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Security
Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the CCSP bank for this domain.
Recovery point objective of two hours and recovery time objective of five minutes.
errorWhy it is wrong: This inverts the two metrics: the downtime tolerance drives the RTO and the data-loss tolerance drives the RPO, so swapping them misassigns both figures.
The risk assessment, which enumerates threats and vulnerabilities and estimates the likelihood and impact of specific adverse events.
errorWhy it is wrong: A risk assessment is tempting because it also weighs impact, but it centres on threat likelihood and specific risks rather than ranking business functions and their outage consequences over time.
A multi-region active-active deployment serving live traffic from both regions simultaneously.
errorWhy it is wrong: Active-active gives near-zero RTO and RPO but at the highest cost, which is disproportionate to a service that tolerates hours of downtime and a limited budget.