SY0-701 Question 152
Single answerConsiderations: Availability , Resilience , CostA regional healthcare provider is redesigning its patient appointment portal after several outages during peak enrollment periods. The portal must remain accessible to patients even if a single web server fails, but the organization has a limited budget and cannot justify building a fully redundant secondary site. Which solution BEST balances availability, resilience, and cost for this scenario?
- A
Deploy two load-balanced web servers in the primary site and use regular backups to restore service if one fails
- B
Deploy multiple web servers behind a load balancer in the primary site with health checks and automatic failover
- C
Implement a cold site in another region and manually fail over the portal during an outage
- D
Purchase a DDoS protection service only, since outages during peak periods are usually caused by high traffic
- E
Move the portal to a single high-performance server with redundant power supplies and RAID storage
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
The key requirement is to keep the portal available during a single web server failure without the cost of a fully redundant secondary site. The most practical and cost-conscious design is local redundancy: multiple web servers behind a load balancer using health checks and automatic failover. This aligns with common high-availability best practices recommended by vendors and industry guidance, including the use of redundancy to eliminate single points of failure and health monitoring to support resilient service delivery. Backups and cold sites are important for recovery and disaster recovery planning, but they do not meet the requirement for near-immediate continuity during a server failure. Likewise, scaling up one server or adding point solutions such as DDoS protection does not replace architectural redundancy. In Security+ terms, this choice best balances availability, resilience, and cost by improving uptime without the expense of full geographic site duplication.
- A. Incorrect.
This is partially helpful but not the best answer. Two web servers improve availability, but the option focuses on backups to restore service if one server fails. Backups support recovery of data and configurations, not immediate service continuity for a failed node. Without explicitly using health checks and automated traffic redirection, resilience is weaker and downtime may still occur.
- B. Correct.
This is the best answer. Placing multiple web servers behind a load balancer with health checks provides high availability by distributing traffic and removing failed nodes from service automatically. It also improves resilience because the application can continue operating despite a single server failure. Compared with building a full secondary site, this approach is usually much more cost-effective while still addressing the stated requirement.
- C. Incorrect.
This is incorrect because a cold site is inexpensive compared with a hot site, but it does not provide rapid failover or continuous availability. Manual failover and delayed recovery are poor choices for a patient-facing portal that must remain accessible when a single server fails. A cold site addresses disaster recovery more than immediate operational resilience.
- D. Incorrect.
This is incorrect because DDoS protection may help if the outages are caused by malicious traffic, but the scenario specifically requires continued service if a single web server fails. DDoS protection does not by itself provide server redundancy, load distribution, or automatic failover. This option reflects the common misconception that all availability problems are network attacks.
- E. Incorrect.
This is incorrect because a more powerful single server can improve performance, and redundant power plus RAID can protect against some hardware failures, but it still leaves a single point of failure at the system level. If the server or application instance fails, the portal becomes unavailable. This does not provide the same resilience as multiple nodes behind a load balancer.