Cloud Digital Leader Why cloud technology is transforming business Practice Question
An organization wants to ensure business continuity by failing over to a secondary region in case of disaster. Which cloud characteristic enables this capability?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that scalability or resource pooling alone can provide disaster recovery, but failover requires the physical presence of infrastructure in separate geographic regions, which is a function of global infrastructure.
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
✓
Global infrastructure
Global infrastructure refers to the distributed network of data centers across multiple geographic regions. By deploying resources in a secondary region, an organization can fail over to that region during a disaster, ensuring business continuity. This capability is unique to the cloud's global footprint, not to other characteristics like scalability or measured service.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Global infrastructure
Why this is correct
Global infrastructure is the correct answer because Google Cloud's global footprint spans multiple independent regions, each with at least three zones. For business continuity, these regions enable cross-region failover: if an entire region experiences an outage, workloads and data can be redirected to a healthy region. This geographic redundancy is designed precisely to support disaster recovery scenarios, unlike the other listed characteristics.
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Scalability
Why it's wrong here
Scalability is incorrect because it refers to a system's ability to handle varying load by automatically adding or removing resources, such as virtual machines or storage capacity. While auto-scaling can maintain performance during demand spikes, it operates within the same region or zone and does not provide geographic failover. Business continuity requires redundant infrastructure in a separate location, not just dynamic sizing of existing resources.
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Measured service
Why it's wrong here
Measured service is incorrect because it describes the cloud metering and billing model where customers pay for the specific resources they consume, such as compute hours or gigabytes stored. This characteristic is about usage tracking, cost transparency, and pay-per-use pricing, but it has no role in ensuring availability during a regional outage. Disaster recovery depends on data replication and failover mechanisms, not on how services are metered.
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Resource pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource pooling is incorrect because it refers to a multi-tenant model where physical infrastructure is shared among many customers through virtualization, allowing providers to maximize efficiency. While pooling enables cost savings and elastic resource allocation, it does not inherently offer protective measures like cross-region redundancy or automated failover. Geographic isolation and recovery from regional disasters are separate architectural decisions, not a byproduct of pooling.
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Related to this question
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud 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 GCDL exam.