Isaca Updated CGEIT Exam Questions and Answers by alanna

Critical success factors (CSFs)are the specific conditions or variables that are essential for achieving business objectives. Effective KPIs must align with these CSFs to ensure they measure what truly matters to project and business success.

KRIs relate to risk, and while important, they serve a different purpose. Future-state architecture and portfolio principles guide strategy, butCSFs provide the foundational context for performance measurement.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

The CGEIT Review Manual 8th Edition, in its Governance of Enterprise IT domain, covers the governance of information assets, including their management across the entire lifecycle (creation, storage, use, archival, disposal). A life cycle approach ensures that information assets are managed systematically to align with business needs, reduce risks, and optimize resources.

Option D: Overall costs are optimized is the greatest benefit. By governing information assets through their lifecycle, enterprises can minimize costs associated with storage, maintenance, and compliance (e.g., avoiding penalties for improper data retention). For example, the approach identifies redundant data for deletion, optimizes storage solutions, and ensures cost-effective compliance with regulations. The manual likely references COBIT 2019’s BAI09-Managed Assets, which emphasizes lifecycle management to achieve cost efficiency.

Option A: Information availability is improved is a benefit, but it’s not the greatest, as availability is just one aspect of governance (e.g., via access controls).

Option B: Operational costs are maintained is inaccurate, as the goal is to reduce, not merely maintain, costs.

Option C: Compliance with regulatory requirements is ensured is a significant benefit, but cost optimization encompasses compliance (e.g., avoiding fines) and other savings, making it broader.

Double Verification: The answer aligns with COBIT’s focus on asset management and the CGEIT domain’s emphasis on cost-effective governance. Cost optimization is a recurring theme in ISACA’s frameworks for lifecycle management.

ISACA CGEIT Review Manual 8th Edition, Domain 1: Governance of Enterprise IT (focus on information asset management).

COBIT 2019, BAI09-Managed Assets.

ISACA Glossary (for definitions of lifecycle management), available at https://www.isaca.org/resources/glossary.

 The first thing that should be done to reduce the complexity of the IT landscape is to conduct strategic planning with business units. Strategic planning is the process of defining the vision, mission, goals, and objectives of the enterprise and how they will be achieved. It also involves aligning the IT strategy with the business strategy and ensuring that they support each other. By conducting strategic planning with business units, the enterprise can identify and prioritize the IT needs and expectations of each business unit, as well as the commonalities and synergies among them. This can help to reduce the complexity of the IT landscape by eliminating duplicate technologies, resolving conflicting priorities, and creating a coherent and consistent IT architecture that meets the business requirements and delivers value. The other options are not as effective as conducting strategic planning with business units for reducing the complexity of the IT landscape. Promoting automation tools used by the business units may improve efficiency and productivity, but it does not address the underlying issues of duplication and conflict. Migrating all in-house systems to an external cloud environment may reduce costs and increase scalability, but it does not ensure alignment and integration of IT systems across business units. Standardizing technology architecture on common products may simplify IT operations and maintenance, but it does not consider the specific needs and preferences of each business unit.

The best way to ensure that security risk is properly addressed when implementing an information security policy exception process is to confirm process owners’ acceptance of residual risk. Residual risk is the risk that remains after applying controls or mitigating measures to reduce the original risk1. Process owners are the individuals or groups that are responsible for the design, execution, and performance of a business process2. By confirming process owners’ acceptance of residual risk, the enterprise can ensure that the security risk associated with the policy exception is understood, acknowledged, and agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders. This can also help to assign accountability and liability for the potential consequences of the policy exception, as well as to monitor and review the risk level and the effectiveness of the controls or mitigating measures. The other options are not as effective as confirming process owners’ acceptance of residual risk for ensuring that security risk is properly addressed when implementing an information security policy exception process. Performing an internal and external network penetration test is a useful technique for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in the network infrastructure, but it does not address the specific security risk related to the policy exception. Obtaining IT security approval on security policy exceptions is a necessary step for validating and authorizing the policy exception, but it does not ensure that the process owners are aware of and accept the residual risk. Benchmarking policy against industry best practice is a good practice for comparing and improving the policy quality and performance, but it does not address the security risk associated with the policy exception.