SAA-C03 Question 186
Single answerAn e-commerce company runs a payment processing system in a single AWS Region. To ensure business continuity, they want to implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy with the following requirements: the system must be operational in a secondary AWS Region within one hour of a failure, and the maximum acceptable data loss is 5 minutes. Which DR strategy best meets their requirements?
- A
Backup and Restore
- B
Pilot Light
- C
Warm Standby
- D
Active-Active Failover
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
Warm Standby is the most appropriate DR strategy in this scenario because it balances cost and recovery requirements. It maintains a scaled-down version of the system in the secondary Region, enabling quick failover to meet the 1-hour RTO and the 5-minute RPO. More basic strategies like Backup and Restore or Pilot Light would likely fail to meet the RTO, while Active-Active would add unnecessary complexity and cost.
- A. Incorrect.
Backup and Restore is not suitable because it does not meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. It usually takes longer to restore systems from backups.
- B. Incorrect.
Pilot Light is a minimal DR approach where only critical components are always running, and the rest need to be scaled up during a disaster. While faster than Backup and Restore, it may still exceed the 1-hour RTO for this scenario.
- C. Correct.
Warm Standby maintains a scaled-down version of the system in another Region, allowing for faster failover within the required RTO of 1 hour and RPO of 5 minutes. This makes it the best option for the given requirements.
- D. Incorrect.
Active-Active Failover is a more expensive approach where all Regions are fully operational at all times. While it meets the RTO and RPO, it is not necessary for this scenario and is overkill for the requirements.