SY0-701 Security Architecture Practice Question
An online ticketing system must survive a single server failure and continue operating after a primary site outage. The business wants the lowest-cost design that still improves availability. Which architecture is best?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers choose active-active (Option A) because it offers the highest availability, but they overlook the explicit 'lowest-cost' constraint, which makes the cheaper active-passive design the correct answer despite its slightly longer failover time.
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 an active-passive design with replicated data and automatic failover to a secondary site.
An active-passive design with replicated data and automatic failover (Option B) meets the requirement of surviving a single server failure and a primary site outage while minimizing cost. Unlike active-active, it uses standby resources that only activate during failover, reducing operational expense. This architecture improves availability without the complexity and cost of multi-region active-active deployment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy active-active servers across multiple regions with load balancing.
Why it's wrong here
Active-active across multiple regions multiplexes production traffic to two live sites, which absolutely survives one server failure—but it requires real-time bidirectional data replication, session affinity/sticky sessions, and global load balancing, plus double infrastructure and licensing costs. For the stated requirement of merely surviving a single server failure, this is over-engineered and unnecessarily expensive, introducing cross-region latency and consistency complexity. It is not the minimum viable solution.
- ✓
Use an active-passive design with replicated data and automatic failover to a secondary site.
Why this is correct
An active-passive design keeps a secondary site on standby with continuously replicated data (synchronous or asynchronous). When the primary server fails, automatic failover triggers the standby to become active, typically within seconds or minutes, and clients are redirected via a DNS change or virtual IP. This directly addresses a single server failure while limiting standby costs because the passive site runs at reduced capacity until needed.
- ✗
Schedule nightly backups and restore only after the outage is confirmed.
Why it's wrong here
Nightly backups capture a snapshot of data at a point in time, so after a server failure you must provision new infrastructure, restore the last backup, and then replay any transactions that occurred since the backup was taken. This yields an RPO of up to 24 hours and an RTO that can stretch to hours or even days, during which the ticketing system is completely offline. Backups are a last-resort recovery control, not a high-availability failover mechanism.
- ✗
Add RAID to the server to protect against all availability failures.
Why it's wrong here
RAID (e.g., RAID 1 or RAID 10) protects only against physical disk failures by mirroring or striping data across multiple drives inside one server. It does nothing for a complete server crash, operating system failure, network outage, power loss, or any disaster that takes down the entire host or site. The root cause of the failure in this question is a whole server, not a disk, so RAID alone cannot satisfy the availability requirement.
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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.