SY0-701 Security Architecture Practice Question
A customer portal must keep operating if one application server fails and also remain available if an entire site goes offline. Management is willing to pay more for automatic failover and the shortest possible interruption. Which design is best?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse high availability within a single site (like a standby server in the same rack) with disaster recovery across sites, failing to recognize that site-level failures require geographic redundancy, not just server-level redundancy.
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
✓
An active-active deployment across two sites with load balancing and replicated data.
An active-active deployment across two sites with load balancing and replicated data ensures continuous operation if one application server fails and also if an entire site goes offline. Load balancers distribute traffic to healthy servers, and synchronous data replication keeps both sites consistent, enabling automatic failover with minimal interruption. This design meets the requirement for the shortest possible interruption because failover is instantaneous and does not require manual intervention or data restoration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
An active-active deployment across two sites with load balancing and replicated data.
Why this is correct
An active-active deployment across two sites uses load balancers to distribute traffic to both locations, with data continuously replicated between sites. If one site fails, the load balancer instantly shifts all traffic to the surviving site, and because both are actively serving, failover requires no startup time. This architecture achieves near-zero RPO and RTO, but demands careful session management (e.g., sticky sessions or distributed caching) and conflict resolution for replicated writes, adding complexity and cost.
- ✗
A cold site that restores from nightly backups after a failure.
Why it's wrong here
A cold site has no pre-positioned hardware or infrastructure; after a disaster, servers must be procured, installed, and configured before services can resume. Restoring from nightly backups means any data changes since the last backup are lost, and the recovery process typically takes hours or days. This yields an RTO and RPO far too high for a customer portal that must keep operating with minimal interruption, so it fails the stated availability requirement.
- ✗
A single active site with one standby server in the same rack.
Why it's wrong here
A single active site with one standby server in the same rack provides redundancy only against a single server failure; the standby likely shares the same power distribution unit, network switch, and physical location as the primary. A fire, power outage, or network failure affecting that rack or the entire facility will take both servers offline simultaneously. Because the design lacks geographic separation and independent infrastructure, it cannot ensure continuous operation during site-level outages, which the requirement demands.
- ✗
RAID 1 on the database server with no additional redundancy.
Why it's wrong here
RAID 1 on the database server mirrors disk writes to two physical drives, protecting against a disk failure but doing nothing for application server crashes, database process failures, network outages, or site-wide disasters. It provides no failover to another server and no off-site copy of data, so if the server itself or the entire facility goes down, the portal stops. Moreover, RAID 1 alone does not address load balancing, so even in normal operation the single server must handle all traffic, creating a single point of failure.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SY0-701 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 SY0-701 exam.