easyMultiple Choice
CCSP Practice Question: Ensure that its cloud infrastructure can…
A company wants to ensure that its cloud infrastructure can automatically add capacity during traffic spikes and remove capacity during low demand. Which cloud characteristic is primarily needed?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the distinction between rapid elasticity and resource pooling, where candidates mistakenly think that sharing resources (pooling) inherently enables scaling, but pooling is about multi-tenancy, not dynamic capacity adjustment.
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
✓
Rapid elasticity
Rapid elasticity is the cloud characteristic that enables automatic scaling of resources up or down in response to demand, often leveraging orchestration tools like AWS Auto Scaling or Azure VM Scale Sets. This ensures that capacity matches workload spikes and troughs without manual intervention, directly addressing the requirement for dynamic capacity adjustment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Broad network access
Why it's wrong here
Broad network access concerns reachability of services over networks from diverse client devices; it does not add or remove capacity. It would be correct when the requirement is accessing cloud services from anywhere, rather than matching supply to fluctuating demand.
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Measured service
Why it's wrong here
Measured service means metering and billing of consumption; it reports usage but does not itself provision or deprovision resources. It would be correct when the requirement is per-use billing transparency, chargeback or cost allocation across business units.
- ✓
Rapid elasticity
Why this is correct
Rapid elasticity directly satisfies the automatic scaling constraint: resources provision and deprovision dynamically to match demand, expanding during spikes and contracting during lulls. Unlike measured service or on-demand self-service, elasticity specifically addresses bidirectional, proportional capacity adjustment, which is the exact behaviour the stem requires.
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Resource pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource pooling shares physical hardware among tenants; it does not add or remove capacity. Elasticity provides that automatic scaling. Pooling is the right characteristic when the requirement is multi-tenancy and cost efficiency through shared infrastructure, not demand-driven scaling.
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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.