CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company wants to use AWS for disaster recovery but wants to minimize costs. They only need backups of their data, with recovery taking several hours if disaster strikes. Which DR strategy requires the least investment?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse 'least investment' with 'fastest recovery,' leading them to choose Pilot Light or Warm Standby, but the question explicitly prioritizes minimizing costs over recovery speed, making Backup and Restore the correct choice despite its longer RTO.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Backup and Restore
The Backup and Restore strategy (Option C) requires the least investment because it involves periodically copying data to low-cost storage like Amazon S3 (including S3 Glacier for archival) and only restoring infrastructure when needed. This approach has the highest Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), often measured in hours, which aligns with the requirement of minimizing costs while tolerating several hours for recovery.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Pilot Light
Why it's wrong here
Pilot Light keeps a minimal core running in the recovery Region — typically just the database layer with replication, with compute stopped. This avoids the cost of a full standby environment, but on failover you must rebuild the application and testing resources, so RTO is still much longer than Active/Active. It is wrong for this question because it incurs continuous runtime and storage costs (for the core instances) that are higher than simply paying for backup storage in S3/Glacier, while still not providing the near-zero RTO of Warm Standby or Multi-Site.
- ✗
Warm Standby
Why it's wrong here
Warm Standby runs a scaled-down, fully functional copy of your production environment continuously, ready to be scaled up on failover. This means paying for running EC2 instances, a load balancer, managed databases, and other services 24/7, even if only at a smaller size. Although it recovers faster than Pilot Light, its operating cost is materially higher because compute resources are never fully stopped, whereas Backup and Restore requires no running infrastructure during normal operations. That ongoing compute expense is exactly why it is not the least-cost DR strategy for this question.
- ✓
Backup and Restore
Why this is correct
Backup and Restore minimizes cost by paying only for backup storage — such as S3, S3 Glacier, or EBS snapshots — with no compute, load balancers, or database servers running during normal operations. Recovery consists of restoring data and then provisioning infrastructure, which can take hours, so RTO is much longer than any strategy that runs infrastructure continuously. This is the correct answer because the question asks for the lowest-cost option, and Backup and Restore has no idle runtime fees, only storage fees.
- ✗
Multi-Site Active/Active
Why it's wrong here
Multi-Site Active/Active runs a full production-capable copy of your application in two or more AWS Regions simultaneously, with traffic load-balanced across both sites. It delivers the best RTO and RPO, often near zero, but it is the most expensive DR strategy because you pay for duplicate compute, storage, databases, and networking at full production scale in every active Region. This makes it precisely the opposite of a low-cost strategy, so it is incorrect for this question, which specifically favors the least expensive approach.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This CLF-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 993-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.