- A
Confidentiality
Why wrong: Confidentiality focuses on restricting access to data to authorized users, often through encryption. Redundancy across regions does not directly address who can see the data.
- B
Integrity
Why wrong: Integrity ensures data has not been altered by unauthorized parties. While failover mechanisms may preserve data integrity, the primary goal of multi-region deployment is to keep the service running, not to prevent modification.
- C
Availability
Correct. Availability ensures that resources are accessible to authorized users when needed. Deploying across multiple regions with automatic failover is a classic implementation of availability.
- D
Non-repudiation
Why wrong: Non-repudiation prevents individuals from denying that they performed an action. This is typically achieved through audit logs or digital signatures, not through geographic redundancy.
SC-900 Practice Question: Describe the concepts of security, compliance, and identity
This SC-900 practice question tests your understanding of describe the concepts of security, compliance, and identity. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company hosts a mission-critical customer portal on Azure virtual machines. To ensure continuous availability, they deploy the application across two separate Azure regions. If one region experiences a failure, traffic is automatically routed to the other region with minimal disruption. Which security goal is primarily being addressed by this architecture?
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
Availability
Deploying a mission-critical application across two Azure regions with automatic traffic routing directly addresses the security goal of availability. This architecture ensures that if one region fails, the application remains accessible from the other region, minimizing downtime. Azure Traffic Manager or Azure Front Door can be used to route traffic based on priority or latency, providing high availability and disaster recovery.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Confidentiality
Why it's wrong here
Confidentiality focuses on restricting access to data to authorized users, often through encryption. Redundancy across regions does not directly address who can see the data.
- ✗
Integrity
Why it's wrong here
Integrity ensures data has not been altered by unauthorized parties. While failover mechanisms may preserve data integrity, the primary goal of multi-region deployment is to keep the service running, not to prevent modification.
- ✓
Availability
Why this is correct
Correct. Availability ensures that resources are accessible to authorized users when needed. Deploying across multiple regions with automatic failover is a classic implementation of availability.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- ✗
Non-repudiation
Why it's wrong here
Non-repudiation prevents individuals from denying that they performed an action. This is typically achieved through audit logs or digital signatures, not through geographic redundancy.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates may confuse high availability (availability goal) with disaster recovery or think that multi-region deployment primarily protects data confidentiality or integrity, when in fact it is designed to ensure continuous service uptime.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, Azure Traffic Manager uses DNS-based traffic routing with health probes (HTTP/HTTPS/TCP) to detect endpoint failures and automatically redirect traffic to healthy regions. The failover time depends on the DNS TTL and probe interval, typically 30–60 seconds. In a real-world scenario, combining Availability Zones within a region with multi-region deployment provides both zone-level and region-level resilience, meeting a 99.99% SLA for critical workloads.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
- Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
- Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
- Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A company's IT admin needs to give a contractor read-only access to production logs without sharing account credentials. Using role-based access control (RBAC) and temporary scoped permissions — not a permanent shared password — is the correct pattern. Questions like this test whether you can apply least-privilege access across cloud identity services.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SC-900 question test?
Describe the concepts of security, compliance, and identity — This question tests Describe the concepts of security, compliance, and identity — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Availability — Deploying a mission-critical application across two Azure regions with automatic traffic routing directly addresses the security goal of availability. This architecture ensures that if one region fails, the application remains accessible from the other region, minimizing downtime. Azure Traffic Manager or Azure Front Door can be used to route traffic based on priority or latency, providing high availability and disaster recovery.
What should I do if I get this SC-900 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
This SC-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 SC-900 exam.
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