SY0-701 Security Architecture Practice Question
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?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse high availability (multiple servers with a load balancer) with data redundancy (RAID) or backup strategies (snapshots), thinking any form of redundancy solves the uptime requirement, but only a load balancer with health checks can actively reroute traffic away from a failed server.
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
✓
A load balancer in front of multiple application servers
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.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
A load balancer in front of multiple application servers
Why this is correct
A load balancer sits in front of the application servers and continuously performs health checks (TCP or HTTP probes) against each node. When it detects a failed or unresponsive server, it stops sending new requests to that node and distributes the traffic among the remaining healthy servers. This provides automated failover and horizontal scaling, so the customer portal keeps serving requests even if one application instance goes down. At Layer 7, the load balancer can also inspect application responses, not just TCP connectivity, ensuring that servers with HTTP 500 errors are removed from rotation.
- ✗
A RAID 1 array in the application server
Why it's wrong here
RAID 1 mirrors data at the block level across two physical disks, but it only protects against a disk hardware failure, not an application or OS crash. If the application server's process hangs, the OS memory leaks, or a software bug causes the service to stop responding, both mirrored disks are still accessible but the application cannot handle requests. Additionally, RAID 1 does not perform any health checks or reroute incoming HTTP traffic; it has no awareness of network connections or application state. Therefore, it cannot maintain service availability when the application itself fails.
- ✗
A snapshot of the application server before each update
Why it's wrong here
A snapshot captures the disk state and configuration of the server at a specific point in time so that you can restore the system after a corruption or bad update, but it is not a real-time availability mechanism. During a snapshot restore, the server is offline and the customer portal would be unavailable until the restore completes and the service is manually started. Snapshots also do not monitor the health of the running application or distribute traffic away from a failing node; they are a disaster-recovery tool, not a high-availability feature. They require an administrator to detect the failure and initiate recovery, leading to noticeable downtime.
- ✗
A longer password policy for the portal administrators
Why it's wrong here
A longer, stronger password policy for portal administrators improves authentication security by making brute-force and credential-stuffing attacks harder, but it has zero effect on the application's ability to remain available during a server outage. Password policies address confidentiality and access control, not availability or redundancy; they do not provide an alternate server, nor do they detect and respond to a failed application instance. Even if administrators have strong passwords, requests will still fail when the web server or application crashes because no failover mechanism is involved. This is a security measure, unrelated to uptime and resilience.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Secure Network Design Principles
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.
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.
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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.