This SY0-701 practice question tests your understanding of security architecture. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
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?
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.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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 distributes requests across healthy servers and can stop sending traffic to failed nodes.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
A RAID 1 array in the application server
Why it's wrong here
RAID protects storage availability, but it does not direct web traffic to healthy application servers.
✗
A snapshot of the application server before each update
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots help recovery, but they do not keep live traffic flowing when a server fails.
✗
A longer password policy for the portal administrators
Why it's wrong here
Stronger passwords improve access control, but they do not provide service redundancy or failover.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates 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.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Load balancers operate at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) or Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) and use health check probes—such as TCP SYN checks or HTTP 200 responses—to monitor server status. Advanced configurations can use weighted round-robin, least connections, or session persistence (sticky sessions) to optimize traffic distribution. In a real-world scenario, a load balancer like HAProxy or AWS ELB can automatically remove a failing server from the pool within seconds, preventing user disruption.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A security analyst at a medium-sized enterprise encounters this scenario during an investigation or architecture review. The correct answer reflects best practice for the specific threat or control described. Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option. Security exam questions test whether you can match controls to threats in context — not just recall definitions.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this SY0-701 question in full detail.
Security Architecture — This question tests Security Architecture — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: 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.
What should I do if I get this SY0-701 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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