IBM Assessment: Cloud Solutions v1 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A global enterprise is designing a multi-region cloud architecture on IBM Cloud that requires data sovereignty compliance across EU, US, and APAC regions. The application uses microservices with eventual consistency requirements and must maintain sub-100ms latency for regional users while ensuring GDPR compliance. Which architectural approach best addresses these requirements?

During a complex migration to IBM Cloud, a financial services company discovers that their legacy mainframe application has undocumented dependencies on specific EBCDIC character encoding behaviors and JCL job scheduling with sub-second timing requirements. The application processes 50,000 transactions per second during peak hours. What migration strategy should the architect recommend?

An architect is designing a solution where IBM Cloud Functions must process streaming IoT data from 100,000 devices sending telemetry every 5 seconds. The processing includes ML inference, data enrichment, and writing to multiple downstream systems. Initial testing shows cold start latencies causing 10% message loss during traffic spikes. What optimization strategy will most effectively address this issue?

A healthcare organization migrating to IBM Cloud must maintain a hybrid environment where on-premises systems of record remain while new analytics workloads run in the cloud. The solution must ensure that PHI never persists in cloud storage, support real-time queries returning results within 3 seconds, and maintain full audit trails. During peak hours, queries access 500GB of patient records. Which architecture best satisfies these constraints?

After migrating a three-tier application to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, the operations team reports intermittent 504 Gateway Timeout errors affecting approximately 2% of requests during normal load. Application logs show successful processing, but ingress logs indicate timeouts. The application includes database queries that occasionally take 45-90 seconds for complex reports. What is the most effective solution?

A financial services application on IBM Cloud must integrate with 15 external partner APIs, each with different authentication mechanisms (OAuth 2.0, mutual TLS, API keys, SAML), rate limits, and data formats. The solution must provide unified error handling, circuit breaking, rate limiting, and complete audit trails while supporting 10,000 requests per minute. Which integration architecture provides the most robust and maintainable solution?

A company's IBM Cloud environment experienced a security incident where a compromised service ID with excessive permissions was used to access sensitive data across multiple services. As the security architect, you need to redesign the IAM strategy to prevent similar incidents. The environment includes 50+ microservices across multiple resource groups with different sensitivity levels. What comprehensive approach best addresses this?

An enterprise architect is designing a multi-account IBM Cloud strategy for a corporation with 12 business units, each requiring isolated billing, separate compliance scopes, and different regulatory requirements (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2). However, they need centralized security monitoring, shared networking for internal services, and unified identity management. Which architectural pattern best addresses these conflicting requirements?

A SaaS provider on IBM Cloud must implement tenant isolation for 500+ customers where each tenant's data must be cryptographically isolated, tenant-specific compliance requirements must be enforced programmatically, and the solution must support tenant-specific backup retention policies ranging from 7 days to 7 years. Performance requirements mandate sub-10ms data access latency. What architecture best satisfies these requirements?

A global media company is migrating a video transcoding platform to IBM Cloud that processes user-uploaded content. Current architecture shows unpredictable workload patterns with bursts reaching 1000 concurrent jobs lasting 15-45 minutes each, followed by hours of idle time. Storage requirements include ingesting 50TB daily with 90-day retention for source files and 2-year retention for outputs. Total monthly processing is consistent, but timing is unpredictable. What architecture optimizes cost while meeting performance requirements?