Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business Practice Question
Which cloud benefit allows a company to automatically add or remove computing resources based on demand, avoiding both over-provisioning and under-provisioning?
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
✓
Elasticity
Elasticity (a form of scalability) enables automatic adjustment of resources to match demand, optimizing cost and performance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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High availability
Why it's wrong here
High availability is about maintaining service uptime and resilience against failures, typically through redundancy and failover mechanisms (e.g., multi-AZ deployments, load balancers with health checks). It does not automatically adjust compute capacity in response to demand changes; instead, it ensures that whatever capacity is provisioned remains reachable and operational. Scaling up or down based on workload is the function of elasticity, not high availability.
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Pay-as-you-go
Why it's wrong here
Pay-as-you-go is a consumption-based pricing model where customers pay only for the resources they actually use, rather than upfront or reserved capacity. While this provides cost flexibility and can complement autoscaling, it is a billing and financial concept, not a mechanism that automatically adds or removes resources. The automatic adjustment of resource capacity in response to demand is elasticity, not pricing.
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Elasticity
Why this is correct
Elasticity is the cloud capability that automatically provisions and de-provisions compute, storage, or other resources to match current demand in real time. It relies on monitoring metrics (CPU, memory, request count) and autoscaling policies or services (e.g., Google Cloud Autoscaler, managed instance groups) to increase or decrease capacity without manual intervention. This directly fulfills the requirement to automatically add or remove resources, making it the correct choice.
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Global reach
Why it's wrong here
Global reach refers to a cloud provider's geographic footprint—the number and distribution of regions, zones, and edge points of presence—that allows deploying workloads closer to end users for lower latency and better compliance. It does not involve dynamic resource adjustment or demand-based scaling; rather, it is about static placement and availability across geographies. The benefit of automatically adding or removing capacity is unrelated to geographic spread.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Elasticity
Elasticity is the ability of a cloud system to automatically add or remove computing resources (like servers, storage, or bandwidth) in response to real-time changes in demand.
Key term
Scalability
Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources, either by making the existing resources more powerful (vertical scaling) or by adding more resources (horizontal scaling).
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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.