SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A company needs a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy with an RTO of 30 minutes and an RPO of 15 minutes. They want to minimize costs while having a scaled-down version of their core environment always running in a second region. Which DR strategy should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Warm Standby with Pilot Light; they choose Pilot Light because it sounds cheaper, missing that Pilot Light's RTO is too high for a 30-minute requirement.
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
✓
Warm Standby.
A Warm Standby DR strategy involves running a functional but scaled-down version of the application in a separate region. This allows for a very low Recovery Time Objective (RTO) because the core infrastructure is already live. Data is replicated frequently to meet the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes, providing a balance between cost and speed.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Backup and Restore.
Why it's wrong here
Backup and Restore is the most cost-effective but slowest DR strategy. It involves restoring backups after a disaster occurs, which can take hours or days. This would fail to meet the 30-minute RTO requirement, as provisioning new infrastructure and restoring large datasets from backups cannot typically be completed within that aggressive time window.
- ✗
Pilot Light.
Why it's wrong here
In a Pilot Light strategy, only the most critical core elements (like the database) are kept running and up-to-date in the DR region. Other resources, like application servers, are provisioned only during a disaster. While faster than Backup and Restore, it often takes longer than 30 minutes to scale and configure the full environment.
- ✓
Warm Standby.
Why this is correct
Warm Standby keeps a minimized version of the full environment running in the second region. This ensures that the application is always ready to handle traffic, and only needs to be scaled up to meet production loads during a failover. This strategy easily fits the 30-minute RTO and 15-minute RPO requirements while remaining cost-conscious.
- ✗
Multi-site Active-Active.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-site Active-Active involves running the full production environment in two or more regions simultaneously and splitting traffic between them. This provides the lowest RTO and RPO (near zero) but is the most expensive strategy because you are paying for full duplicate infrastructure at all times, which does not align with the goal of minimizing costs.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
This SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.