SY0-701 Question 182
Single answerEase of recoveryA company is redesigning its backup strategy after a ransomware incident. During the last recovery effort, administrators found that full backups stored on offline media were intact, but restoring several critical application servers took too long because each system had to be rebuilt manually before data could be restored. The security manager wants to improve ease of recovery while keeping strong ransomware resilience. Which of the following should the company implement FIRST?
- A
Create and maintain golden images for critical servers and workstations
- B
Increase the password length requirement for all administrator accounts
- C
Replace full backups with differential backups only
- D
Enable account lockout after three failed logon attempts
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Ease of recovery focuses on how quickly and reliably an organization can return systems to operation after an incident. In practice, this means not only having backups, but also having streamlined restoration methods such as documented recovery procedures, tested recovery workflows, and standardized system images. In this case, offline backups already provided resilience against ransomware, but manual server rebuilding slowed restoration. Golden images directly improve recovery time by allowing administrators to redeploy operating systems and baseline configurations quickly before restoring application data. This aligns with common disaster recovery and business continuity best practices, including maintaining known-good baseline configurations, documenting restoration procedures, and regularly testing recovery processes as recommended in guidance such as NIST contingency planning and recovery planning practices.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Golden images provide standardized, known-good system baselines that can be rapidly deployed during recovery. In this scenario, the main problem is not the integrity of the backup data but the time required to rebuild systems before restoring data. Maintaining updated golden images improves ease of recovery by reducing rebuild time and supporting consistent, repeatable restoration of critical systems after an incident such as ransomware.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Stronger administrator passwords are important for security, but they do not directly address the recovery bottleneck described in the scenario. The issue is the time and effort required to rebuild systems, not weak authentication controls.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Differential backups may reduce restore complexity compared with long chains of incremental backups, but the scenario specifically says the delay came from manually rebuilding servers before restoring data. Changing backup type alone does not solve the underlying ease-of-recovery problem.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Account lockout can help reduce some brute-force attempts, but it does not improve the speed or simplicity of rebuilding systems after an outage or ransomware event. This option addresses preventive access control, not recoverability.