50 IBM Assessment: Cloud Computing and Business Process Services v1 Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A startup wants to host a simple public website with minimal operational overhead. They want the cloud provider to handle OS patching and runtime maintenance. Which cloud service model best fits this requirement?

A client is considering moving a customer relationship management (CRM) application to the cloud. They require access from multiple locations, rapid onboarding, and minimal internal IT administration for the application itself. Which approach best meets these needs?

A business process services (BPS) engagement is being planned. The client wants to ensure both parties agree on measurable performance outcomes such as response times and transaction accuracy. Which document is most appropriate to formalize these metrics?

A team needs a secure way to store and manage API keys, passwords, and certificates used by multiple cloud applications. Which IBM Cloud capability is the best fit?

A global HR department wants to outsource payroll processing. A key requirement is consistent execution across countries with clear governance, defined controls, and continuous improvement. Which BPS approach best aligns with this requirement?

An application on IBM Cloud experiences intermittent failures when calling an external service. Operations needs near real-time visibility into request latency and error rates, plus the ability to set alerts when thresholds are exceeded. What is the most appropriate solution?

A bank is designing a hybrid architecture. Regulatory constraints require certain data to remain on-premises, while analytics workloads can run in the cloud. The solution must securely connect on-premises systems to IBM Cloud with consistent network performance. Which design choice best meets the requirement?

A BPS provider is onboarding a new client and must document the current end-to-end process, identify bottlenecks, and propose automation opportunities. Which activity should be performed FIRST to ensure accurate analysis?

A microservices application running in containers must securely call other internal services. Security policy requires short-lived credentials, fine-grained access control, and no hard-coded secrets in container images. Which approach best satisfies these requirements?

An enterprise wants to migrate a multi-tier application to IBM Cloud. The web tier is stateless, but the database requires strong consistency and must survive a zone failure with minimal data loss. Which architecture choice best addresses this requirement?

A project team is deciding whether a new customer portal should be deployed as a set of microservices or as a single application. Which characteristic most strongly favors a microservices approach?

A business process services team is asked to identify opportunities to improve an invoice-to-cash process. Which metric is MOST directly used to measure process efficiency?

An application running on IBM Cloud needs to store configuration values (e.g., API endpoints, feature flags) outside of code so they can be changed without redeploying. What is the BEST approach?

A client wants to migrate a customer support workflow to a Business Process Service. The workflow includes multiple handoffs, frequent exceptions, and unclear ownership of steps. What should be done FIRST to reduce transition risk?

A retail company is designing an event-driven architecture on IBM Cloud. They want multiple downstream systems (inventory, shipping, analytics) to consume the same order-created event independently. Which design best meets this requirement?

A regulated client requires that all access to sensitive data stored in IBM Cloud is logged and periodically reviewed. Which combination BEST satisfies this requirement?

A client is moving a claims processing process to BPS and is defining SLAs and KPIs. Which KPI is MOST appropriate to measure service quality from the end-customer perspective?

A team deployed a stateless web service behind a load balancer on IBM Cloud. Users report intermittent logouts and lost shopping carts when traffic increases. What is the MOST likely cause?

An enterprise wants a hybrid integration approach: on-premises systems must securely connect to IBM Cloud services, and integrations should be governed, reusable, and monitored. Which approach BEST fits these needs?

A bank is designing a cloud-based document processing solution. Requirements include: data must be encrypted at rest and in transit, access must follow least privilege, and encryption keys must be controlled and rotated by the bank. Which design choice BEST meets these requirements?

A project team is deciding whether a workload fits Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS). The primary requirement is to minimize OS patching and runtime maintenance while still deploying custom application code. Which cloud service model best fits?

A client wants their finance invoice-approval process handled by a Business Process Services (BPS) provider. They require clearly defined turnaround times and escalation steps for exceptions. Which deliverable best captures these operational commitments?

A team is deploying a new application on IBM Cloud and must ensure that all cloud resources (compute, storage, networking) are created consistently across environments with repeatable changes and peer review. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A healthcare client plans to move an application with highly variable traffic to the cloud. The solution must handle sudden spikes without manual intervention and avoid over-provisioning during normal operation. Which cloud characteristic best addresses this need?

A BPS provider is redesigning a client's claims intake process to reduce errors. They want to introduce controls that prevent incomplete submissions from entering downstream processing. Which technique best supports this objective?

A company wants a single sign-on (SSO) experience for multiple IBM Cloud-hosted applications and needs centralized user lifecycle management (provisioning/deprovisioning). Which solution is most appropriate?

A team is integrating an IBM Cloud-based order system with several external partners. The partners’ systems occasionally time out, causing order submissions to fail. Which integration pattern best improves resilience while decoupling the systems?

A BPS engagement includes automating parts of a customer onboarding process. The client is concerned that automation might reduce auditability and increase compliance risk. Which design choice best improves audit readiness while using automation?

A bank is deploying a multi-tier application on IBM Cloud. Security requires that application servers are not directly reachable from the public internet, but the web tier must remain publicly accessible. Which network design best meets this requirement?

After deploying an integration flow, a team notices intermittent duplicate transactions being processed when a downstream service briefly fails and then recovers. They already implemented retries. What is the most effective additional measure to prevent business impact from duplicates?

A project team is comparing cloud service models. They want a model where the provider manages the OS, runtime, and scaling, while the team focuses only on deploying application code. Which model best fits?

A finance department requires that sensitive customer identifiers be protected even from cloud administrators who can access storage systems. Which security control best addresses this requirement?

A company is moving a paper-based invoice approval process to a Business Process Services (BPS) provider. The company wants clear accountability for turnaround time and error rates. What should be established first to manage this relationship effectively?

A BPS client wants to reduce operational risk by ensuring that process changes (e.g., new approval thresholds) are implemented consistently and are auditable. Which practice best supports this goal?

A team is designing a cloud application that must remain available if a single compute instance fails. Which approach most directly supports this requirement?

A company uses IBM Cloud Object Storage for documents. Users report occasional access issues from remote offices, and operations wants to confirm whether the problem is related to network path, DNS resolution, or service endpoint availability. What is the MOST appropriate first step?

A solution uses IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and must securely pull images from a private container registry. Which Kubernetes mechanism is typically used to provide registry credentials to workloads?

An enterprise wants to integrate an on-premises ERP system with a cloud-based BPS workflow. They require reliable delivery, the ability to buffer bursts, and decoupling between systems. Which integration pattern is the best fit?

A company wants to adopt IBM Cloud for regulated workloads. They require separation of duties, centralized access control, and consistent permissions across multiple teams and services. Which approach best meets these needs?

A BPS engagement includes a new customer onboarding process. The client wants to ensure the provider can demonstrate continuous improvement over time, not just meet baseline SLAs. Which metric type most directly supports this objective?

A project team is comparing cloud service models. They want a model where they manage only the application and data, while the provider manages the runtime, middleware, OS, and infrastructure. Which model best fits?

An HR department wants to outsource payroll processing to reduce internal workload while maintaining defined service levels and compliance reporting. Which offering most directly matches this need?

A cloud governance team wants to reduce risk by ensuring no single person can both approve and execute a sensitive production change. What control best addresses this requirement?

A retail company is modernizing an order-processing application. They need asynchronous communication between microservices to handle traffic spikes and to avoid tight coupling. Which approach is most appropriate?

A customer plans to run a customer-facing web app on IBM Cloud and wants a managed relational database to reduce operational overhead (patching, backups, high availability). Which choice best matches?

A Business Process Services provider is onboarding a new client and must document process performance and outcomes. Which metric is the best indicator of process effectiveness (not just efficiency)?

A company wants to migrate several applications to cloud. One legacy app cannot be modified in the short term, but the business wants faster migration with minimal change. Which migration approach is most appropriate for that application?

A client integrating an external SaaS with an internal order system reports intermittent duplicate orders. The integration uses at-least-once message delivery. What is the best design change to prevent duplicates from causing incorrect processing?

A global enterprise must keep customer PII in a specific geography while still using cloud analytics capabilities. Which architecture best satisfies data residency while enabling analytics?

A BPS engagement includes an SLA stating "99% of cases must be completed within 24 hours." After onboarding, the provider meets the average completion time but frequently breaches the 24-hour target for a subset of cases. What should be done first to address this issue?