MS-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
A company uses a cloud provider that hosts multiple customers on the same physical servers. Each customer's data and applications are isolated, but customers have no knowledge or control over the exact physical location of their resources. Which cloud characteristic does this describe?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse resource pooling with rapid elasticity because both involve shared infrastructure, but resource pooling specifically focuses on multi-tenancy and location transparency, not dynamic scaling.
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
✓
Resource pooling
Resource pooling is the correct answer because the scenario describes a multi-tenant model where the cloud provider's physical and virtual resources are pooled to serve multiple customers, with isolation between tenants. Customers have no knowledge or control over the exact physical location of their resources, which is a defining characteristic of resource pooling as defined by NIST SP 800-145.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Resource pooling
Why this is correct
Resource pooling is the cloud characteristic that lets a provider serve many customers, or tenants, from shared physical infrastructure—servers, storage, and network—while isolating each tenant's data and workloads through virtualization and access controls. In Microsoft 365, this means compute and storage capacity are pooled across customers but logically segmented per tenant. This directly matches the scenario's wording, so it is the correct answer.
- ✗
Rapid elasticity
Why it's wrong here
Rapid elasticity is about capacity scaling, not infrastructure sharing: cloud systems can automatically provision and release compute, memory, and storage to match fluctuating demand, making resources appear unlimited to the consumer. A tenant on Microsoft 365 can add or remove licenses or storage quickly, but that dynamic scalability does not explain how multiple customers coexist on the same physical hardware. Therefore, this option describes a different NIST characteristic than resource pooling.
- ✗
On-demand self-service
Why it's wrong here
On-demand self-service lets a customer provision computing capabilities, such as virtual machines or user licenses, unilaterally through a web portal or API without requiring manual provider intervention. It removes human friction from setup and administration, but says nothing about whether the underlying physical resources are dedicated or shared across customers. Because the scenario is specifically about a provider hosting multiple customers on shared infrastructure, this characteristic is not the one being described.
- ✗
Measured service
Why it's wrong here
Measured service means the provider automatically meters and optimizes resource usage, using monitoring data to bill each customer for exactly what they consume, often pay-per-use. This characteristic underpins transparent cost allocation and can be applied within a multi-tenant environment, but metering or billing is not the same as physically sharing infrastructure among multiple customers. The question focuses on the shared-hosting aspect, not on usage measurement, so this option is incorrect.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This MS-900 question is part of Courseiva's 217-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This MS-900 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft 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 MS-900 exam.