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CCSP Practice Question: A cloud architect is designing a multi-region…
A cloud architect is designing a multi-region application to ensure high availability. The application must automatically fail over to a secondary region if the primary region becomes unavailable. Which strategy best meets this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the misconception that active-active architectures inherently provide automatic failover, but they actually require both regions to be active and healthy, and failover is a separate mechanism; the trap is that candidates confuse load balancing with failover, leading them to choose active-active when the requirement explicitly calls for automatic failover from an unavailable primary region.
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
✓
Active-passive with automated failover using health checks
Active-passive with automated failover using health checks is the correct strategy because it ensures that the secondary region automatically takes over when the primary region fails, without manual intervention. Health checks continuously monitor the primary region's endpoints (e.g., via HTTP/HTTPS probes or TCP checks), and upon detecting consecutive failures (e.g., 3 failed health checks), the failover mechanism—such as DNS-based routing with a low TTL (e.g., 60 seconds) or a global load balancer—automatically redirects traffic to the passive secondary region. This meets the high availability requirement by minimizing downtime while keeping the secondary region idle to reduce costs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Active-passive with manual failover
Why it's wrong here
Manual failover is not fully automated.
- ✓
Active-passive with automated failover using health checks
Why this is correct
Correct: Health checks trigger automatic failover.
- ✗
Active-active with load balancing across regions
Why it's wrong here
Active-active distributes load but does not provide automated region failover.
- ✗
Read replicas in secondary region
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas are for read scaling, not automatic failover.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CCSP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 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 CCSP exam.