A company wants a disaster recovery setup for a web application. They want to keep costs low but still recover within a couple of hours after a regional disruption. They are willing to run only minimal infrastructure in the secondary location and scale it up during the outage. Which DR approach best matches this requirement?

Active-active, where both Regions run full production at all times.

Active-active runs full production continuously, which is typically higher cost than required here.

Cold standby, where no infrastructure is running in the secondary Region until an outage occurs.

Cold standby usually results in longer recovery times because core services must be built from scratch.

Backups-only, where recovery relies solely on manually restoring snapshots during an outage.

Backups-only can meet RPO but is often too slow for a couple-hour RTO without automation.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Pilot light, where the secondary Region keeps minimal core components ready and scales up during failover. — Pilot light is a DR strategy where the secondary Region runs only the minimal components required to bring the application up quickly (for example, core networking and databases, with or without scaled-down stateless services). When a disruption occurs, the system scales up to the required production size. This provides a faster RTO than cold standby while still being cheaper than active-active, which operates full production in both Regions continuously. Active-active duplicates production workloads in both Regions, driving higher cost than the scenario’s goal. Cold standby keeps almost nothing running, so recovery often takes longer than a couple of hours. Backups-only relies on restore operations during an outage, which may not consistently meet the “recover within a couple of hours” expectation.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.