What is the purpose of a backup strategy in IT continuity planning?

• A. To improve system performance.
• B. To restore data and services after loss, meeting defined RTO and RPO objectives.
• C. To prevent unauthorized access.
• D. To increase user productivity

Answer: (B)

The main idea is resilience through the ability to recover after an incident. A backup strategy exists to restore data and services after loss, within the targets an organization sets for downtime and data loss. Those targets are the Recovery Time Objective (how quickly you must be back up) and the Recovery Point Objective (how much data you can afford to lose). A well-designed backup strategy matches backup frequency, types (full, incremental, differential), and storage (on-site, off-site, or cloud) with these targets, and it includes regular restore tests to prove you can meet them. It’s not primarily about speeding performance, preventing unauthorized access, or boosting day-to-day productivity; those are handled by other controls. Instead, backups enable you to recover to a known good state after events like hardware failure, human error, or cyber incidents, keeping critical services available.