Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
Which THREE options are valid strategies for disaster recovery (DR) in Google Cloud?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse high-availability features (like snapshots or CDN) with true disaster recovery, which requires geographic separation and automated failover mechanisms.
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
✓
Deploy a mirrored environment in another region and use Traffic Director to fail over.
Option B is correct because deploying a mirrored environment in a second region and using Traffic Director for global load balancing and failover provides true cross-region DR, ensuring workloads survive a full regional outage. Option D is correct because a Cloud Storage bucket in a different region with Object Versioning enabled gives durable, geographically separated copies of data and protects against accidental deletion or overwrite, which is a valid DR strategy. Option E is correct because a Cloud SQL cross-region replica can be promoted to a standalone primary during a regional failure, restoring database availability in another region. Option A is not a valid DR strategy because snapshots stored in the same region are lost if that region fails, so they do not provide disaster recovery. Option C is not a DR strategy because Cloud CDN caching static content from multiple origins improves performance and availability but does not by itself recover from a regional disaster or protect stateful data.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Store hourly snapshots of Compute Engine disks in the same region.
Why it's wrong here
Same-region snapshots share the region's failure domain, so a regional outage destroys both source disks and snapshots. It is tempting because snapshots are cheap and simple, and they are correct for zonal disk recovery or accidental deletion, but DR requires replication to a separate region or multi-region storage.
- ✓
Deploy a mirrored environment in another region and use Traffic Director to fail over.
Why this is correct
A mirrored environment in a second region provides a warm or hot standby, and Traffic Director performs global load balancing with health-checked failover, redirecting traffic when the primary region fails. This satisfies the requirement for a cross-region DR strategy on Google Cloud.
- ✗
Enable Cloud CDN to cache static content from multiple origins.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN caches static content at edge locations to cut latency and origin load; it holds no authoritative data and provides no failover capability. It is tempting because CDNs improve resilience during traffic spikes, and would be correct for accelerating global static asset delivery, not for recovering workloads after a regional outage.
- ✓
Use a Cloud Storage bucket in a different region with Object Versioning enabled.
Why this is correct
A cross-region Cloud Storage bucket with Object Versioning preserves prior object generations, enabling recovery of overwritten or deleted data after regional failure or corruption. This satisfies the DR requirement for durable, geographically separated backup of object data.
- ✓
Configure a cross-region replica for Cloud SQL and promote it during failover.
Why this is correct
Cross-region replication continuously ships Cloud SQL data to a secondary region, satisfying the DR requirement for regional outage resilience. Promoting the replica during failover restores write capability without restoring backups, meeting the recovery time objective. This mirrors the warm-standby pattern expected for managed database DR in Google Cloud.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Load Balancing and Autoscaling
Key term
Caching
Caching is the process of storing copies of frequently accessed data in a temporary storage location, known as a cache, so that future requests for that data can be served faster and with less computational effort.
Key term
Regional
Regional refers to a deployment strategy where cloud resources are distributed across multiple geographic areas to improve availability, reduce latency, and meet compliance requirements.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCA 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 PCA exam.