Section 1: 35–45%I5

Business Resilience: Backup, Recovery, and Continuity

Exam insight

When systems fail, the speed and completeness of recovery determine whether a business survives, so the AICPA tests backup types, recovery objectives, and disaster-recovery site tradeoffs. Distinguishing RTO from RPO and hot, warm, and cold sites is a near-certain exam topic.

What AICPA wants you to know

1Distinguish full, incremental, and differential backups.
2Differentiate recovery time objective (RTO) from recovery point objective (RPO).
3Compare hot, warm, and cold disaster-recovery sites and their tradeoffs.
4Distinguish business continuity planning from disaster recovery planning.
5Explain redundancy, failover, high availability, and the need to test the plan.

Patterns in this topic

The exam re-skins the same archetypes. Recognize these here, then drill them in the Pattern Lab.

The Resilience PlanContinuity planning sets two clocks and a site: RTO is downtime tolerated, RPO is data loss tolerated, and the site speed must match.

Exam tip

Study smarter: before you expand each card, cover the screen and try to recall what the concept means from its title alone. Retrieving it from memory builds the recall the exam actually tests, and it beats re-reading.