CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Question
A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a mission-critical application hosted in a single cloud region. The business requires that the application survive the loss of an entire region and that failover be largely automated with minimal data loss. The budget permits a warm standby environment. Which TWO design elements should the architect include to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that in-region redundancy such as multiple availability zones protects against the loss of an entire region.
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
✓
Deploy a warm standby environment in a second region that can be scaled up on failover.
Surviving a full regional outage with minimal data loss requires both a copy of the data and configuration outside the failed region and a second-region environment ready to take over. Continuous cross-region replication minimizes the recovery point objective, while a warm standby that scales up on failover provides a rapid, largely automated recovery path within the stated budget.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Rely on manual runbooks to rebuild the environment after a regional outage is detected.
Why it's wrong here
Manual runbooks can document recovery steps, but rebuilding from scratch is slow and error-prone, contradicting the requirement for largely automated failover. Manual processes also extend recovery time and increase the chance of misconfiguration during a high-pressure event. Automation, not documentation alone, is needed to meet the recovery objectives.
- ✓
Deploy a warm standby environment in a second region that can be scaled up on failover.
Why this is correct
A warm standby runs a reduced but functional copy of the application in another region, so failover does not require building infrastructure from scratch. It can be scaled to full capacity when the primary region fails, meeting the automated, low-downtime requirement while respecting the budget that rules out a fully active-active deployment. This directly addresses surviving a regional outage.
- ✗
Store nightly database backups exclusively in the primary region's object storage.
Why it's wrong here
Keeping backups only in the primary region means a regional failure destroys both the application and its backups, leaving nothing to recover from. Nightly backups also imply up to a day of data loss, which conflicts with the minimal-data-loss requirement. Backups must be copied to a separate region to serve as a recovery source.
- ✗
Configure the application to use a single availability zone within the primary region for lowest latency.
Why it's wrong here
Concentrating the application in one availability zone reduces resilience even within the region and does nothing to address the loss of an entire region. This design element moves in the opposite direction of the stated requirement and would fail the regional-survivability test. It may lower latency, but availability is the governing objective here.
- ✓
Replicate application data and configurations to a second region continuously.
Why this is correct
Continuous replication to a second region keeps a near-current copy of data and configuration outside the failure domain of the primary region. This enables recovery with minimal data loss, supporting a low recovery point objective, and gives the warm standby environment the artifacts it needs to take over. Without cross-region replication, a regional loss would destroy the only copy of the data.
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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 CompTIA exam blueprint
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