According to the web search results, a consistency group is a group of related applications or services that must be recovered together in order to work properly, and this means more than being recovered at the same time67. They also typically need to be recovered to the same point in time6. Therefore, to meet the requirement of protecting all VMs of a multi-tier application at the same time, the administrator must create a consistency group for the application and place all VMs in it8. This way, the administrator can apply data protection policies and schedules to the entire consistency group as a single unit8.