ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

A warm standby strategy keeps a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the workload (including web and application servers plus continuously replicated databases) running in a second region. Because data is replicated almost in real time, the recovery point objective can be limited to minutes. Bringing the standby environment up to full production capacity typically involves scaling out and updating DNS or load-balancer records, tasks that can be completed within one to two hours, meeting the required RTO.

Backup-and-restore relies on periodic snapshots stored in object storage; restoring and re-provisioning all resources usually exceeds a two-hour RTO and may lose more than 15 minutes of data. A multi-site active-active model would meet or beat the RPO and RTO but is excluded by the stated budget constraints because it requires running full-scale resources in multiple regions at all times. A pilot-light approach maintains only the core database components in the secondary site; if replication occurs only daily, the 15-minute RPO cannot be met, and additional time is needed to build out application and web tiers, risking the two-hour RTO.