SAA-C03 Warm standby Practice Question
A retail platform needs disaster recovery across AWS Regions. The business requirement is: RTO up to 6 hours, RPO up to 1 hour, and they want the ability to start serving quickly during a Region outage but do not want to run full production capacity continuously. Which DR strategy best fits these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse pilot light with warm standby, assuming that minimal resources (pilot light) can meet the 6-hour RTO, but pilot light requires manual provisioning of compute and scaling, which often exceeds the RTO, while warm standby provides a pre-provisioned, ready-to-scale environment that meets the 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, keeping a reduced but ready-to-scale environment in the secondary Region.
Warm standby is the best fit because it maintains a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the production environment in the secondary Region, allowing the RTO of 6 hours and RPO of 1 hour to be met without running full production capacity continuously. During a disaster, the standby environment can be scaled up quickly to serve traffic, balancing cost and recovery 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 only, with no continuously running infrastructure in the secondary Region.
Why it's wrong here
Backups with no warm infrastructure typically lead to longer recovery times and may miss a 6-hour RTO target.
- ✗
Pilot light, keeping only the minimum resources needed to bootstrap the environment.
Why it's wrong here
Pilot light usually provides very limited capacity and may still take too long to become fully operational within 6 hours.
- ✓
Warm standby, keeping a reduced but ready-to-scale environment in the secondary Region.
Why this is correct
Warm standby maintains enough infrastructure to reduce recovery time, while not fully running production capacity continuously.
- ✗
Multi-site active-active, serving production traffic from both Regions at all times.
Why it's wrong here
Active-active involves running full production in both Regions, which is more operationally complex and costlier than required.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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