SY0-701 Security Architecture Practice Question
A customer portal must continue operating if one application server fails. The business wants a simple, cost-conscious design that improves availability. What is the best approach?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse data protection (backups) with high availability (redundancy), or they think vertical scaling (bigger server) is a simpler solution, but the exam specifically tests the concept of eliminating a single point of failure through horizontal scaling and load balancing.
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
✓
Add a second application server behind a load balancer.
Adding a second application server behind a load balancer creates an active-passive or active-active cluster that provides redundancy. If one server fails, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the healthy server, ensuring continuous operation. This design is cost-conscious because it uses commodity servers rather than expensive vertical scaling, and it directly improves availability by eliminating the single point of failure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Add a second application server behind a load balancer.
Why this is correct
This is the best answer because it adds redundancy and allows traffic to continue flowing if one application server goes down. A load balancer can route users to the healthy server, which improves availability without requiring a much more expensive architecture. For a simple portal, this is a practical fault-tolerance upgrade that reduces the impact of a single server failure.
- ✗
Schedule nightly backups to a different storage account.
Why it's wrong here
Nightly backups to a separate storage account address data durability and disaster recovery, not application availability. In the event of a server failure, the portal remains unreachable until you restore the application to a new compute instance, which typically takes minutes to hours and incurs data loss up to the previous backup. Backups provide an RPO and RTO, but they do not offer the automatic failover or continuous service that a redundant server behind a load balancer would provide.
- ✗
Buy a larger server with more CPU and memory.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up by purchasing a larger server with more CPU and memory is a vertical scaling strategy that improves performance under load but does not eliminate the single point of failure. That one server is still the sole host for the application; if it experiences a hardware fault, OS crash, or network outage, the portal goes down regardless of its capacity. True high availability requires redundant, independent compute resources that can take over traffic automatically.
- ✗
Move the portal to a different subnet without changing the servers.
Why it's wrong here
Moving the portal to a different subnet is a network segmentation change that does not alter the application's underlying infrastructure. The same servers remain the only compute resources, so they still present the same single point of failure; a server crash or maintenance event still stops the portal. A subnet change might even require updating routing and security policies, but it provides no failover capability or additional resilience.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Secure Network Design Principles
Key term
Load balancer
A load balancer is a device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers so no single server gets overwhelmed.
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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