92. d. Documenting the recovery plan should be done first and be available to use during a recovery as a guidance. The amount of time and effort in developing the plan has no bearing on the real recovery from a disaster. On the other hand, the amount of time and effort spent on the other three choices and the degree of perfection attained in those three choices will definitely help in reducing the recovery time after a disaster strikes. The more time spent on these three choices, the better the quality of the plan. The key point is that documenting the recovery plan alone is not enough because it is a paper exercise, showing guidance. The real benefit comes from careful implementation of that plan in actions.
93. An organization’s effective presentation of disaster scenarios should be based on which of the following?
a. Severity and timing levels
b. Risk and impact levels
c. Cost and timing levels
d. Event and incident levels
93. a. The disaster scenarios, describing the types of incidents that an organization is likely to experience, should be based on events or situations that are severe in magnitude (high in damages and longer in outages), occurring at the worst possible time (i.e., worst-case scenario with pessimistic time), resulting in severe impairment to the organization’s ability to conduct and/or continue its business operations.
The planning horizon for these scenarios include short-term (i.e., less than one month outage) and long-term (i.e., more than three month outage), the severity magnitude levels include low, moderate, and high; and the timing levels include worst possible time, most likely time, and least likely time. The combination of high severity level and the worst possible time is an example of high-risk scenario. The other three choices are incorrect because they are not relevant directly to the disaster scenarios in terms of severity and timing levels except that they support the severity and timing levels indirectly.
94. The focus of disaster recovery planning should be on:
a. Protecting the organization against the consequences of a disaster
b. Probability that a disaster may or may not happen
c. Balancing the cost of recovery planning against the probability that a disaster might actually happen
d. Selecting the best alternative backup processing facilities
94. a. The focus of disaster recovery planning should be on protecting the organization against the consequences of a disaster, not on the probability that it may or may not happen.
95. Which of the following statements is not true about the critical application categories established for disaster recovery planning purposes?
a. Predefined categories need not be followed during a disaster because time is short.
b. Each category has a defined time frame to recover.
c. Each category has a priority level assigned to it.
d. The highest level category is the last one to recover.
95. a. It is important to define applications into certain categories to establish processing priority. For example, the time for recovery of applications in category I could be less than 8 hours after disaster declaration (high priority). The time frame for recovery of category IV applications could be less than 12 hours after disaster declaration (low priority).
96. The decision to fully activate a disaster recovery plan is made immediately:
a. After notifying the disaster
b. Before damage control
c. After damage assessment and evaluation
d. Before activating emergency systems
96. c. The decision to activate a disaster recovery plan is made after damage assessment and evaluation is completed. This is because the real damage from a disaster could be minor or major where the latter involves full activation only after damage assessment and evaluation. Minor damages may not require full activation as do the major ones. The decision to activate should be based on cost-benefit analysis.
A list of equipment, software, forms, and supplies needed to operate contingency category I (high priority) applications should be available to use as a damage assessment checklist.
97. Which of the following IT contingency solutions requires a higher bandwidth to operate?
a. Remote journaling
b. Electronic vaulting
c. Synchronous mirroring
d. Asynchronous mirroring
