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CISA Practice Question: A financial institution operates a critical…
A financial institution operates a critical payment processing system that must maintain 99.999% availability. The system is deployed across two data centers in active-active mode with load balancing. During a routine maintenance window, a network misconfiguration caused all traffic to be directed to one data center, which then became overloaded and crashed, resulting in 30 minutes of downtime. The incident response team wants to prevent recurrence. Which of the following is the BEST action?
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
✓
Configure health checks on the load balancers to detect and isolate unhealthy nodes.
Configuring health checks on load balancers would have detected the overloaded data center and isolated it, preventing the crash and downtime. Option B is administrative and does not prevent the technical root cause. Option C is costly and does not prevent misconfiguration. Option D describes a reactive measure that does not address the immediate traffic redirection issue.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure health checks on the load balancers to detect and isolate unhealthy nodes.
Why this is correct
Correct. Health checks allow load balancers to monitor node health and automatically reroute traffic away from unhealthy nodes, preventing overload and crashing.
- ✗
Schedule all maintenance during non-peak hours only.
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Scheduling maintenance during non-peak hours may reduce impact but does not prevent the misconfiguration or its consequences.
- ✗
Increase the capacity of each data center to handle full traffic load.
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Increasing capacity does not address the root cause of misconfiguration; it only masks the problem and is cost-prohibitive.
- ✗
Implement automatic failover to the backup data center when a threshold is exceeded.
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Automatic failover is a reactive measure that still requires detection; health checks provide proactive detection and isolation.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CISA practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA 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 CISA exam.