What is a key component of disaster recovery readiness for identity management?

• A. Backups of identity data
• B. Increase system complexity
• C. Remove runbooks
• D. Disable failover

Answer: (A)

Having backups of identity data is a fundamental pillar of disaster recovery readiness for identity management. In an identity system, critical information—such as user accounts, credentials, permissions, roles, and policy configurations—must be recoverable after a disruption. Regular, tested backups allow you to restore this data to a known good state quickly, which is essential for resuming authentication and access control services with minimal downtime. They also support meeting recovery objectives by limiting data loss (RPO) and restore time (RTO), especially when combined with validated restore procedures and secure storage.

Choosing more complexity doesn’t improve recovery; it often slows it down and introduces more points of failure. Removing runbooks eliminates the step-by-step guidance needed to recover services, making disasters harder to recover from. Disabling failover defeats the purpose of disaster recovery by preventing automatic switching to a healthy environment, leading to longer outages. Backups address the core need to reconstruct identity data after an incident, enabling a faster and more reliable restoration of identity services.