Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Reliability

  Why it's wrong here

  Reliability in cloud architecture concerns the ability to recover from failures and maintain uptime (e.g., via redundancy, failover, and health checks). While a reliable system might be available during a traffic spike, reliability alone does not guarantee that additional capacity is provisioned to meet increased demand; it focuses on resilience to component failures rather than dynamic resource scaling. Thus, reliability is necessary but not sufficient for handling sudden spikes.

• ✗

  Security

  Why it's wrong here

  Security encompasses identity management, encryption, network protection, and compliance controls. It does not directly influence how many requests a system can process, nor does it add compute or storage capacity during demand peaks. While security misconfigurations can cause availability issues, implementing security best practices does not inherently enable a retailer to absorb sudden traffic surges.

• ✗

  Cost optimisation

  Why it's wrong here

  Cost optimisation involves managing cloud spend through right-sizing, reserved capacity, and eliminating waste. It could constrain capacity if overly aggressive, but the primary goal is to minimize costs, not to elastically expand resources. While cost controls might sometimes limit auto-scaling limits, cost optimisation itself does not actively respond to demand spikes; instead, it seeks to align spending with actual usage patterns.

• ✓

  Scalability

  Why this is correct

  Scalability is the ability of a system to handle growing workloads by adding resources—either vertically (increasing instance size) or, more commonly for cloud-native apps, horizontally (adding more instances, often via managed instance groups and autoscaling policies). During holiday sales, a scalable architecture (e.g., using Google Cloud's managed instance groups, Cloud Load Balancing, and autoscaling based on CPU utilization or request count) can seamlessly provision additional capacity to match traffic spikes, ensuring consistent performance even as demand multiplies. This directly addresses the retailer's need to absorb transient peaks without manual intervention or capacity planning.

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