MS-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
A tenant administrator is advising a department that wants to keep services available during a hardware failure. Cloud concept or benefit best matches this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse high availability with disaster recovery or data protection features like DLP, but high availability specifically focuses on minimizing downtime during failures, not on preventing data loss or classifying data.
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
✓
High availability
High availability (C) is the correct answer because it directly addresses the requirement to keep services available during a hardware failure. High availability refers to a system's ability to remain operational and accessible despite component failures, typically achieved through redundancy, failover clustering, and load balancing. In Microsoft 365, this is implemented via redundant infrastructure across multiple datacenters and automatic failover mechanisms, ensuring service continuity without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Microsoft Planner
Why it's wrong here
Microsoft Planner is a task and plan coordination tool for team work tracking; it offers no compute redundancy or failover capability. It would be correct for organising project tasks, but hardware-failure availability is delivered by cloud redundancy and geo-distributed infrastructure, not planning software.
- ✗
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Why it's wrong here
DLP identifies and prevents exfiltration of sensitive data across email, endpoints and cloud apps; it addresses data governance, not infrastructure resilience. It would be correct for stopping credit card numbers leaving the tenant, not for maintaining service availability when hardware fails.
- ✓
High availability
Why this is correct
High availability keeps services reachable during hardware failure by using redundancy such as multiple nodes, load balancing, and failover, so no single component outage causes downtime. This matches the department's requirement to maintain continuous service availability.
- ✗
Sensitivity labels
Why it's wrong here
Sensitivity labels classify and protect content through encryption and marking; they provide no redundancy, so a hardware failure still takes services offline. They are tempting because data classification genuinely supports compliance and leakage prevention, but availability during hardware failure requires resilience built into the platform's infrastructure, not labelling.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard
Key term
Tenant
A dedicated and isolated instance of Microsoft Entra ID that an organization receives when signing up for a Microsoft cloud service.
Key term
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based cloud service from Microsoft that combines productivity tools like Office apps with security, device management, and online storage.
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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.