SY0-701 Security Architecture Practice Question
A customer portal must stay online if an entire site fails, and the company must also be able to recover if data is corrupted or encrypted by ransomware. Which two design choices best satisfy both requirements? Select two.
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume RAID or local backups provide sufficient protection against site outages and ransomware, but RAID only handles disk failure and same-site backups are vulnerable to the same ransomware attack, so both requirements demand geographically separate, immutable backups and multi-site failover.
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
✓
Use active-active or automatic failover between two sites with health checks.
Active-active or automatic failover between two sites with health checks ensures that if an entire site fails, traffic is automatically redirected to the surviving site, maintaining availability. This design satisfies the first requirement of staying online during a site failure by using redundant infrastructure and health monitoring to detect and react to outages.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use active-active or automatic failover between two sites with health checks.
Why this is correct
A second site with automatic failover or active-active traffic handling preserves availability when one location goes offline. Health checks let the load balancer or orchestration layer stop sending traffic to a failed site quickly. This directly addresses the requirement to keep the portal online during a total site outage.
- ✗
Keep only RAID 1 inside each server, because mirroring alone handles site outages.
Why it's wrong here
RAID improves local disk resilience, but it does not protect against an entire site failure. It also does not provide recovery from corruption or ransomware. Disk mirroring is useful, but it is only one layer and cannot satisfy the full availability and recovery requirement by itself.
- ✓
Maintain immutable offsite backups and test restores on a regular schedule.
Why this is correct
Immutable backups protect recovery copies from tampering, deletion, or encryption by an attacker. Offsite storage adds geographic separation, which helps if the primary site is lost. Restore testing proves the backups are usable, so the organization knows it can actually recover rather than merely store copies.
- ✗
Store nightly backups on the same storage array as the production data.
Why it's wrong here
Backups on the same storage array may be fast, but they are vulnerable to the same outage, corruption, or ransomware event as production data. This does not provide meaningful site independence or recovery assurance. Backup location and immutability matter as much as backup frequency.
- ✗
Replace the load balancer with a static DNS record for each server.
Why it's wrong here
Static DNS records do not provide rapid health-based failover and are slow to react to outages. They also place too much responsibility on clients or manual updates during an incident. A resilient design needs automated failover, not just name resolution.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Secure Network Design Principles
Key term
Ransomware
Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts a victim's files or locks them out of their system, demanding payment, usually in cryptocurrency, to restore access.
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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