Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question: An architect proposes using a 'private cloud'…

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

• ✗

  Advantage: private cloud is always cheaper than public cloud. Trade-off: private cloud provides less storage capacity

  Why it's wrong here

  Private cloud is rarely cheaper than public cloud at equivalent scale. The opposite is usually true — without global scale economics, private cloud costs more per unit. Storage capacity can match requirements with sufficient investment.

• ✓

  Advantage: full control over data residency, security posture, and compliance configuration. Trade-off: organization bears full cost of infrastructure, loses public cloud's scale economics, and has limited elasticity compared to public cloud's vast resource pools

  Why this is correct

  This captures both sides accurately. Private cloud satisfies regulatory requirements for data control and residency. But the organization must fund all infrastructure, skilled operations staff, and hardware refresh — at costs that rarely match public cloud's shared-scale economics. Elasticity is limited to what the organization has built, not global resource pools.

• ✗

  Advantage: private cloud provides automatic scaling to unlimited capacity. Trade-off: private cloud requires purchasing hardware every time capacity is needed

  Why it's wrong here

  Private cloud cannot automatically scale to unlimited capacity because its ceiling is fixed by the physical servers and storage the organization has deployed; adding capacity requires procurement, installation, and configuration, which takes time and capital. Unlimited, on-demand elasticity is a defining property of public cloud, whose shared resource pools give customers access to effectively infinite capacity. This option also misassigns the trade-off: the cost of buying hardware for each expansion is real, but it is a consequence of private cloud's finite capacity, not a reason to call it an advantage.

• ✗

  Advantage: private cloud services are managed by the cloud provider, reducing operational burden. Trade-off: customers cannot customize private cloud configurations

  Why it's wrong here

  Private cloud is not managed by the cloud provider unless the organization buys a hosted private cloud service, and even then the provider does not own or operate the deployment as a shared public service. By definition, private cloud is dedicated to a single organization, so it supports deep customization of networking, storage, and security controls rather than restricting them. The real trade-off is that the organization carries the full operational burden for the dedicated infrastructure, including patching, capacity planning, and hardware lifecycle, whereas a public provider absorbs much of that burden.

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