SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new disaster recovery solution for a critical application running on Amazon EC2. They need to replicate data across AWS Regions with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. Which THREE actions should they take to meet these objectives?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Multi-AZ (which provides high availability within a single Region) with cross-region disaster recovery, leading them to incorrectly select Option E despite it not addressing regional isolation.
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
✓
Create a CloudFormation template to provision the infrastructure in the secondary region
AWS CloudFormation templates enable infrastructure-as-code, allowing rapid and consistent provisioning of the secondary region environment. This automation is essential to meet the 1-hour RTO, as it eliminates manual setup and reduces recovery time to minutes by deploying pre-defined stacks.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Manually create and copy AMIs to the secondary region weekly
Why it's wrong here
Manual weekly copies do not meet the 15-minute RPO.
- ✓
Create a CloudFormation template to provision the infrastructure in the secondary region
Why this is correct
CloudFormation allows rapid deployment of infrastructure in the DR region.
- ✓
Use AWS Backup to automate cross-region EBS snapshot copies
Why this is correct
AWS Backup can automate EBS snapshot copies across regions with frequent schedules.
- ✓
Enable cross-region replication on the Amazon S3 buckets containing application data
Why this is correct
S3 cross-region replication replicates data with low RPO.
- ✗
Configure the EC2 instances in a Multi-AZ Auto Scaling group
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ Auto Scaling groups replicate EC2 instances across Availability Zones within a single AWS Region, not across AWS Regions, so they cannot achieve cross-region data replication for an RPO of 15 minutes. This option is tempting because Multi-AZ deployment is a standard pattern for high availability and fault tolerance within a Region, and it would be the correct choice if the requirement were to survive an Availability Zone failure rather than a full Region outage.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SAP-C02 question from scratch — 1,660 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or 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 SAP-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 SAP-C02 exam.