Question 609 of 1,013
SY0-701 Security Architecture Practice Question
A customer portal must keep operating if one application server fails. Management wants the simplest and lowest-cost design that still improves availability. What should the team implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse high availability with disaster recovery, choosing synchronous replication and a second data center (Option B) when a simpler active/passive failover within the same site meets the requirement at lower cost.
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 hot standby application server with automatic failover.
A hot standby (active/passive) application server with automatic failover provides the simplest and lowest-cost improvement to availability. It eliminates the single point of failure by having a standby server ready to take over if the primary fails, without requiring complex load balancing or synchronous replication. This design directly addresses the requirement of keeping the portal operational during a single server failure while minimizing cost and complexity.
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 more backups and schedule them every hour.
Why it's wrong here
Hourly backups provide a recovery point objective (RPO) of up to one hour and require a separate server to restore onto, so they do not prevent downtime. When the application server fails, the portal remains offline while the latest backup is located, restored, and the application is reconfigured. Backups are a disaster-recovery mechanism, not an availability mechanism; they can reduce data loss but cannot keep the service operating through a hardware or software failure.
- ✗
Use a second data center with synchronous replication and active-active clustering.
Why it's wrong here
A second data centre with synchronous replication and active-active clustering introduces significant cost and operational complexity, directly contradicting management’s requirement for the simplest and lowest-cost design. This option is tempting because it is a standard high-availability architecture for zero-downtime failover across sites, and it would be correct if the scenario demanded continuous availability during a full data-centre outage rather than merely surviving a single application-server failure.
- ✓
Deploy a hot standby application server with automatic failover.
Why this is correct
A hot standby provides a ready replacement if the primary application server fails, and automatic failover restores service without waiting for manual intervention. This design improves availability while staying simpler and less costly than a full active-active architecture across multiple sites. It matches the business need for continuity after one server failure without overengineering the solution.
- ✗
Restart the failed server manually after the help desk is notified.
Why it's wrong here
A manual restart depends on the help desk first detecting the outage, opening a ticket, and then physically or remotely rebooting the server—which could take minutes or hours. If the failure was due to a hardware fault, a restart will not bring the service back at all. This reactive approach leaves the portal unavailable during the entire intervention window, whereas the requirement calls for continuous operation across a single server failure.
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Same concept, more angles
3 more ways this is tested on SY0-701
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. 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?
easy- ✓ A.Add a second application server behind a load balancer.
- B.Schedule nightly backups to a different storage account.
- C.Buy a larger server with more CPU and memory.
- D.Move the portal to a different subnet without changing the servers.
Why A: 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.
Variation 2. A customer portal must stay online if one application server fails. Which two design choices improve availability? Select two.
easy- ✓ A.Use load balancing across multiple application servers.
- ✓ B.Add a redundant standby server or failover target.
- C.Store the application logs on a larger disk.
- D.Increase the password length requirement for portal users.
- E.Place all traffic on a single high-performance server.
Why A: Load balancing (A) distributes incoming traffic across multiple application servers; if one fails, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining healthy servers, eliminating a single point of failure. A redundant standby server (B) also improves availability by providing a failover target: if the primary server fails, the standby can take over, minimizing downtime. Both designs introduce redundancy, which is essential for high availability.
Variation 3. A customer portal must keep serving requests if one application server stops responding. The team wants traffic to be sent to whichever healthy server is available. Which design should they implement?
easy- ✓ A.A load balancer in front of multiple application servers
- B.A RAID 1 array in the application server
- C.A snapshot of the application server before each update
- D.A longer password policy for the portal administrators
Why A: A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple application servers and performs health checks (e.g., HTTP GET requests to a /health endpoint) to detect failures. If one server stops responding, the load balancer automatically routes requests only to the remaining healthy servers, ensuring continuous availability. This design directly meets the requirement for fault tolerance and active traffic distribution.
Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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