SC-200 Manage a security operations environment Practice Question
Your organization uses Microsoft Defender for Cloud. You need to recommend a solution to automatically remediate misconfigurations in Azure VMs without manual intervention. What should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Advisor's recommendations with Defender for Cloud's recommendations, not realizing that only Defender for Cloud offers the 'Remediate' button for automatic enforcement, while Advisor merely provides advisory guidance without automated action.
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
✓
Enable 'Remediate' option in Defender for Cloud recommendations
Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a 'Remediate' button on security recommendations that can automatically apply the necessary configuration changes to Azure resources, such as VMs, without manual intervention. This feature leverages Azure Policy's 'deployIfNotExists' effect to enforce compliance by running remediation tasks at scale, directly addressing misconfigurations like open management ports or missing disk encryption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure Advisor recommendations
Why it's wrong here
Azure Advisor does surface security-related recommendations, but it is fundamentally an advisory service that prioritizes best practices across cost, performance, reliability, and security. It lacks a native one-click remediation engine; acting on an Advisor security recommendation usually opens the relevant Azure blade and still requires manual configuration changes. Therefore, while Advisor can help identify issues, it cannot automatically enforce fixes on its own.
- ✗
Configure Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed for data protection and disaster recovery—it creates recovery points and restores virtual machines, files, and workloads from backup vaults. It does not assess or modify the live configuration of Azure resources, so a security misconfiguration like an overly permissive network security group or unencrypted storage account remains exactly as it was. Enabling Backup has no effect on the security posture tracked by Defender for Cloud, making it an irrelevant solution for automated remediation.
- ✗
Set up Update Management in Azure Automation
Why it's wrong here
Update Management in Azure Automation (and the newer Azure Update Manager) is narrowly scoped to OS patch compliance: it scans virtual machines for missing updates and orchestrates installation. It cannot fix non-system misconfigurations such as open management ports, missing disk encryption, weak authentication settings, or improper role assignments. Because the task is to remediate general security misconfigurations, relying on Update Management would leave all non-patch issues untouched.
- ✓
Enable 'Remediate' option in Defender for Cloud recommendations
Why this is correct
The 'Remediate' option in Microsoft Defender for Cloud recommendations is the only choice that directly applies automated corrective actions to non-compliant resources. When you trigger it, Defender for Cloud often deploys an Azure Policy assignment with the DeployIfNotExists effect, which automatically reconfigures the resource to meet the security recommendation. This one-click operation fixes the misconfiguration at scale without requiring manual edits, which is exactly what the organization needs.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SC-200 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 SC-200 exam.