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CCSP Practice Question: A healthcare organization recently migrated a…
A healthcare organization recently migrated a patient records management application from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud environment using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The application was originally designed as a monolithic workload running on bare-metal servers. After migration, the application is deployed on a fleet of virtual machines (VMs) of the same instance type. The organization is using a combination of Reserved Instances for baseline capacity and On-Demand instances to handle spikes. However, two months after the migration, the cloud bill is 40% higher than the estimated on-premises total cost of ownership. Additionally, performance reports indicate that the application experiences inconsistent latency and occasional timeouts during peak hours. The operations team has confirmed that the application code has not changed, and the cloud provider's infrastructure is healthy. There is no issue with network bandwidth or storage I/O. The team is considering several options to address both cost and performance issues. What should the team do first?
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
✓
Perform a rightsizing analysis of the current VM usage and adjust instance types accordingly.
The symptoms (high cost and inconsistent performance) strongly suggest that the instances are not appropriately sized for the workload. Rightsizing based on actual metrics (CPU, memory, I/O) is the most direct and effective first step to reduce waste and improve performance. Option A is too drastic; moving to serverless would require significant architectural changes and is not a quick fix. Option C (Spot Instances) is unsuitable for baseline capacity because they can be terminated with little notice, which would disrupt a monolithic application. Option D (consolidation into fewer, larger instances) might reduce licensing costs but assumes that the current instances are underutilized; it could exacerbate performance issues if the application is not designed to scale horizontally.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Migrate the application to serverless compute to eliminate the need to manage VMs.
Why it's wrong here
Serverless requires refactoring the application, which is time-consuming and risky. It does not address the immediate cost and performance issues without significant effort.
- ✓
Perform a rightsizing analysis of the current VM usage and adjust instance types accordingly.
Why this is correct
Rightsizing addresses both cost and performance by matching instance resources to actual workload demands. It is a standard first step in cloud optimization.
- ✗
Consolidate the workload into fewer, larger instances to reduce overhead and licensing costs.
Why it's wrong here
Consolidation might reduce costs if instances are underutilized, but it does not address performance issues and could create a single point of failure or actually worsen performance if the application is not optimized for vertical scaling.
- ✗
Replace On-Demand instances with Spot Instances to reduce costs during spikes.
Why it's wrong here
Spot Instances can be terminated with minimal notice, which is not suitable for a stateful monolithic application that cannot tolerate interruptions.
Visual reference
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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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.