Question 24
Domain 4: Security Operations, Monitoring, and Incident ResponseA company is designing a business continuity plan for its multi-region cloud deployment. Which strategy provides the HIGHEST level of availability but at the greatest cost?
Correct answer: D
Explanation
Hot standby with full capacity in multiple regions keeps a fully provisioned environment ready to take over immediately, which delivers the highest availability and the fastest failover. Because each region maintains "full capacity," the organization pays for duplicate infrastructure across regions, making it the greatest cost option.
Why each option is right or wrong
A. Cold standby in a secondary region
B. Pilot light with minimal running services
C. Warm standby with scaled-down resources
D. Hot standby with full capacity in multiple regions
A hot-standby architecture is the most resilient recovery model because the secondary environment is already provisioned and can assume production traffic with essentially no warm-up delay, giving the shortest recovery time objective and the least interruption during a regional failure. In a multi-region deployment, maintaining full capacity in each region means paying for duplicate compute, storage, and networking resources continuously, so it delivers the highest availability at the highest ongoing cost.