Certified: The ISACA CISA Prepcast

Welcome to The Bare Metal Cyber CISA Prepcast. This series helps you prepare for the exam with focused explanations and practical context.
Domain Four in the CISA framework addresses the real-time heartbeat of IT environments—operations and business resilience. It encompasses everything from daily service delivery to preparing for disasters and long-term disruptions. This domain equips auditors to evaluate whether systems are monitored, maintained, and recoverable in a way that protects business integrity and supports regulatory expectations. By examining infrastructure management, incident handling, service level monitoring, and recovery planning, auditors determine whether the IT function meets its obligations to the business. CISA exam questions often blend these operational topics with control evaluation, requiring candidates to understand not only what went wrong, but also whether controls were in place to detect, prevent, or recover from issues when they arise.
The core elements of IT operations include monitoring systems for performance and reliability, managing user access, applying patches and updates, and maintaining the integrity of data storage and processing. Incident management plays a major role, covering both detection and resolution of outages, service issues, or security incidents. Configuration and change control are critical to maintain stability across environments. IT operations are also responsible for ensuring that system availability aligns with documented expectations, including service level agreements and business continuity needs. For auditors, the focus is on whether these processes are documented, enforced, and measured, and whether the IT team can demonstrate that the environment is secure, stable, and responsive.
Controls in the operational space fall into familiar categories—preventive, detective, and corrective—but they are uniquely applied to systems and infrastructure. Preventive controls include access restrictions, job scheduling, and failover configurations that avoid problems before they occur. Detective controls include system logs, intrusion detection alerts, and monitoring dashboards that identify issues as they arise. Corrective controls include incident response actions, rollback procedures, and failover activation to restore service and minimize impact. These layers of control must work together to ensure reliability and resiliency. CISA candidates should be able to map each of these control types to specific IT functions and describe how control layering improves operational assurance.
Roles and responsibilities in IT operations are highly specialized and must be clearly defined to prevent confusion and ensure accountability. The IT operations team typically focuses on overall system health, patching, and monitoring. The service desk responds to incidents and supports users. Infrastructure teams manage servers, storage systems, and network connectivity. Meanwhile, business units are responsible for defining operational priorities, setting service expectations, and communicating process requirements. Auditors review how these responsibilities are documented and whether they are supported by role-based access controls, escalation paths, and segregation of duties. CISA exam scenarios may ask you to identify gaps in responsibility or evaluate how role misalignment can lead to control failures or operational breakdowns.
Business resilience is the organization’s ability to withstand or quickly recover from significant disruption, and it extends well beyond traditional IT backup. It includes business continuity planning, which addresses how business processes continue during an outage, and disaster recovery, which focuses on restoring IT systems and infrastructure after failure. True resilience includes the readiness of personnel, clarity of communication protocols, predefined recovery roles, and periodic testing to ensure effectiveness. Resilience planning should cover physical, technical, and organizational elements and must be updated as systems and threats evolve. On the CISA exam, candidates must understand that business resilience is more than backup frequency—it’s about maintaining operational capability under stress and having a controlled recovery strategy that matches business needs.
Availability, capacity, and performance management help ensure systems are responsive and reliable under varying workloads. These practices use metrics and monitoring tools to track response times, resource consumption, and usage trends. Capacity forecasts help IT prepare for spikes in demand or service expansion. Redundancy and failover systems—like clustered servers, load balancing, and mirrored storage—help maintain uptime even if individual components fail. Performance metrics such as mean time to detect, mean time to respond, and mean time to recover give insight into system responsiveness and support team efficiency. Auditors must evaluate whether thresholds are defined, alerts are triggered appropriately, and whether performance monitoring is tied into service level commitments and continuous improvement.
Data backup, storage, and restoration are foundational practices that support business continuity and compliance. Backups may be full, incremental, or differential, and the strategy used must match the business’s recovery needs. Data must be protected not only for availability but also for confidentiality and integrity, especially in regulated industries. Offsite storage, including cloud-based options, is critical for disaster resilience. Restoration procedures must be tested regularly to confirm that backups can be used reliably in a recovery situation. CISA candidates should understand how to evaluate whether backup schedules are sufficient, whether test results are documented, and whether storage security aligns with policy requirements. A backup that exists but cannot be restored is not a control—it’s a liability.
Continuity and disaster recovery planning formalize the processes used to respond to and recover from disruptions. Critical systems must be identified, and each must be assigned Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives that define how quickly they must be restored and how much data loss is acceptable. Disaster recovery options—such as hot sites, warm sites, and cold sites—must be selected based on business risk tolerance, cost, and regulatory needs. Roles and responsibilities must be assigned for crisis communication, technical response, and business coordination. Testing can include tabletop walk-throughs, simulated failovers, or full-scale switchovers to validate the plan’s effectiveness. Auditors examine whether these plans are documented, tested, reviewed, and whether recovery capability matches organizational risk. On the CISA exam, expect questions about planning gaps or mismatches between RTO, RPO, and recovery infrastructure.
Operational risks arise from many sources, including hardware failure, software defects, misconfigurations, cyberattacks, insider threats, and even natural disasters. Risk identification includes tracking incident types and trends, maintaining risk registers, and monitoring operational indicators that suggest vulnerability or performance degradation. Logging tools, performance monitors, and alerting systems provide visibility into emerging threats and trigger escalations. Effective monitoring is essential not only for prevention but also for forensic investigation, compliance reporting, and long-term service improvement. Auditors must assess whether risk indicators are being monitored consistently, whether thresholds are meaningful, and whether alerts result in prompt, appropriate action. For the CISA exam, candidates should know how to connect operational risks with specific monitoring and escalation controls.
The auditor’s role in Domain Four is to evaluate the strength and sustainability of IT operations, along with the organization’s ability to recover from disruptions. This includes reviewing service desk procedures, log management, backup schedules, recovery testing records, and infrastructure documentation. You must assess whether operational controls are documented, repeatable, and aligned with business objectives. You also need to verify that recovery strategies are supported by real infrastructure and tested regularly for effectiveness. The ability to audit this domain demonstrates a strong grasp of real-time operations, infrastructure resilience, and continuous control assurance. In both the CISA exam and professional practice, mastery of Domain Four proves your capacity to audit not just systems—but the environments that keep systems available, secure, and operational under pressure.
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