CIMA BA2 - Fundamentals of Management Accounting Exam Prep Course (Premium File)
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Question 567:

• Correct answer: D — developed by process owners.

• based on industry standards: Helpful for best practices but not sufficient alone; standards may not fit the organization's specifics.
• well understood by all employees: Important for compliance, but only after proper ownership and governance mechanisms are in place.
• updated frequently: Currency is important, but without owners responsible for updates, this often fails.

Question 532:

• Correct answer: C. Regular backups are made and stored offsite

• Why this is the most important: The primary goal of a disaster recovery plan is to enable data and operations recovery after a disaster. If backups are not made regularly or are not stored offsite, a disaster could corrupt or destroy both the original data and any local backups, leaving the organization unable to restore critical systems. Offsite storage protects against site-specific risks (fire, flood, theft, etc.) and ensures data can be restored.

• Why the other options are less critical for recovery capability:

• Audit steps you’d perform: verify backup schedules and frequency, confirm offsite storage and protection, review backup restoration testing and success rates, and ensure retention periods align with business needs.

Question 518:
Answer: B
Why: Data analytics in testing uses actual data to verify controls. By reviewing new account applications from the past month for invalid dates of birth, you analyze real patterns and exceptions, confirming whether the DOB validation is effective and where gaps may exist. This approach leverages data to facilitate testing.
Why the other options are less appropriate:

• A: Reviewing the business requirements for the DOB field helps design tests but doesn’t use data analytics to test the process.
• C: Attempting to submit invalid DOBs is manual testing and doesn’t involve analyzing data to guide testing.
• D: Evaluating configuration settings focuses on setup, not on data-driven testing results.

• Pull the last month of new account applications.
• Identify records with invalid DOBs per the rules.
• Analyze frequency, root causes, and impact to refine test cases and validation rules.

Question 513:

• Correct answer: B — Mirrored sites

• Redundant arrays: protects against disk failures but not site-wide outages or rapid failover between sites.
• Nightly backups: results in high RPO (up to 24 hours) and longer RTO.
• Remote backups: protects against site loss but may involve network latency and not real-time failover; still higher RPO/RTO than true mirroring.

Question 467:

• The correct answer is C: It acts as a measuring tool and progress indicator.

• A maturity model provides defined levels to quantify current capability, baseline gaps, and track improvements over time.
• This measurement and progressReporting support management decisions and visibility into how the organization is advancing.

• A: Identifying weaknesses is part of the assessment, but the primary value is the measurement framework, not just fixing gaps.
• B: Facilitating an improvement plan can result from the assessment, but it’s a consequence, not the core benefit.
• D: Ensuring organizational consistency and improvement is a broader outcome; the core, defining benefit is the measurement of maturity and progress.

Question 466:

• The correct answer is C: System downtime reports.

• SLAs specify required availability. Downtime reports provide actual outages, durations, and times, which let you verify if uptime targets were met and identify any breaches.
• These reports enable calculation of SLA metrics (e.g., uptime percentage, MTTR) and help correlate outages with maintenance windows or incidents.

• System utilization reports show usage patterns, not whether service levels were met.
• Capacity planning tools help foresee demand but don’t confirm actual SLA performance.
• IS strategic plan is high-level and not evidence of current SLA compliance.

Question 452:
Question 452 asks which firewall type provides the GREATEST degree of control against hacker intrusion.

• Packet filtering router: operates at the network layer; filters by IP/port/protocol. Fast but offers limited inspection and control.
• Circuit gateway: acts as a proxy at the session layer; controls connections but not detailed content.
• Application level gateway: proxies at the application layer; can inspect payload, enforce application-specific policies, authenticate users, and provide detailed logging.
• Screening router: generic filtering with less granular control.

Question 441:
Correct answer: C – Continuity of service

• VoIP is real-time and relies on network availability. If the network or power fails, voice communication stops, making continuity of service the highest priority risk from an IS auditor’s perspective.
• Other options: Nonrepudiation is less critical for VoIP; it’s hard to enforce for voice calls. Identity management is important but not the single most important issue. Homogeneity of the network is not essential for VoIP functioning.
• Auditor focus: ensure redundancy, failover capabilities, robust disaster recovery/plans for VoIP, QoS, and emergency call handling to maintain service during outages.

Question 439:
Question 439: Which of the following would be a result of utilizing a top-down maturity model process?

• Correct answer: D: A means of benchmarking the effectiveness of similar processes with peers.

• A top-down maturity model starts at the enterprise level, setting target maturity levels and then assessing processes against external benchmarks.
• This approach emphasizes comparing your processes to peers or industry standards (benchmarking), rather than just internal comparisons.
• By contrast, bottom-up approaches focus on identifying improvement opportunities within individual processes or finding gaps across processes internally.

Question 421:
Correct answer: D. The organization does not monitor upgrades to its software.
Explanation:

• Licensing compliance hinges on ongoing entitlement and usage tracking, including upgrades. If upgrades aren’t monitored, the organization may deploy newer versions or features without updating licenses, potentially violating terms or exceeding approved licenses.
• Option B describes a monthly license verification, which is a positive control and reduces risk. Option A (centralized server) can ease management, not heighten risk. Option C (desktop software expensed, not capitalized) relates more to asset capitalization than license compliance.
• Therefore, failing to monitor upgrades poses the greatest compliance risk during an audit.