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220-1201 Practice Question: A company uses a cloud storage service for backup
A company uses a cloud storage service for backup. The technician needs to ensure that if the primary cloud region goes down, the backups are still accessible from another geographic location. Which cloud characteristic should be configured?
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
✓
High availability
High availability across regions is achieved through redundancy, such as replicating data to multiple geographic locations. This ensures that if one region fails, another can serve the data. Scalability, elasticity, and fault tolerance at a single site do not provide geographic redundancy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Elasticity
Why it's wrong here
Elasticity in cloud computing refers to the system's ability to automatically and dynamically adjust its computational resources, such as CPU, memory, or storage, to meet fluctuating demand in real-time. This automatic scaling up or down ensures optimal resource utilization and cost efficiency by matching supply to demand. However, elasticity primarily addresses dynamic workload management and does not inherently provide protection against a complete regional outage, which requires geographic distribution and failover mechanisms.
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Scalability
Why it's wrong here
Scalability is the capacity of a system to handle a growing amount of work or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. It focuses on increasing the system's ability to manage more users, data, or transactions, often by adding more resources or distributing the load. While crucial for accommodating increased load and growth, scalability alone does not guarantee continuous service during a catastrophic regional failure, as it primarily addresses load handling rather than geographic resilience or immediate failover.
- ✓
High availability
Why this is correct
High availability (HA) is a system design principle and its associated implementation that ensures a very high level of operational performance for a given period, minimizing downtime. When implemented across multiple geographic regions, HA specifically ensures that services remain continuously accessible and operational even if an entire data center or region experiences a complete failure. This multi-regional redundancy is precisely what protects a cloud storage service from a widespread regional outage, allowing for seamless failover and business continuity.
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Fault tolerance
Why it's wrong here
Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating without interruption when one or more of its components fail. This is typically achieved through redundant components within a single system or data center, such as redundant power supplies, network interfaces, or RAID configurations for storage. While essential for internal system resilience against individual component failures, fault tolerance at this localized level does not extend to surviving a widespread regional outage that affects an entire geographic area.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Storage Devices: HDD, SSD, NVMe
Key term
Cloud storage
Cloud storage is a service that lets you save data on remote servers accessed over the internet instead of on your computer's hard drive.
Key term
Elasticity
Elasticity is the ability of a cloud system to automatically add or remove computing resources (like servers, storage, or bandwidth) in response to real-time changes in demand.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1201 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 220-1201 exam.