SAP-C02 Question 202
Single answerA financial services company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for a critical trading application hosted in AWS. The application uses an RDS database with multi-AZ deployment, an EC2-based application layer, and an S3 bucket for storing trade logs. The company has defined an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of 4 hours and an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 15 minutes. Which disaster recovery strategy would best meet the company's requirements?
- A
Warm standby with automated failover for the RDS database and periodic replication of trade logs to a DR region.
- B
Pilot light with manual failover for the RDS database and replication of trade logs every 24 hours.
- C
Backup and restore using daily backups of the RDS database and trade logs stored in S3.
- D
Multi-region active-active architecture with continuous replication of the RDS database and S3 trade logs.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The warm standby strategy is the most appropriate choice for meeting the company's RTO of 4 hours and RPO of 15 minutes. It balances cost and recovery objectives by maintaining a minimal running version of the application in the DR region, which can be scaled up quickly during a disaster. Automated failover and periodic replication ensure that the RPO requirement is also met. Other options either fail to meet the defined objectives or are unnecessarily complex and costly.
- A. Correct.
Warm standby with automated failover ensures that a scaled-down version of the application is always running in the DR region. This setup allows for a recovery time within 4 hours and meets the RPO of 15 minutes by enabling periodic replication to the DR region.
- B. Incorrect.
Pilot light with manual failover could meet the RTO if the failover process is executed efficiently, but replication of trade logs every 24 hours does not meet the RPO requirement of 15 minutes.
- C. Incorrect.
Backup and restore is a cost-effective solution but does not meet the RTO of 4 hours, as restoring the application and database from backups typically takes longer.
- D. Incorrect.
Multi-region active-active architecture exceeds the requirements but is significantly more expensive than necessary for the stated RTO and RPO.