SY0-701 Question 172
Single answerScalabilityA company is deploying a new customer portal that must support rapid growth during seasonal traffic spikes. The security team needs an architecture that can scale out quickly without requiring administrators to manually provision and harden each new server. The solution must also keep security controls consistent across all newly added instances. Which of the following is the BEST approach?
- A
Create a hardened golden image and use it with an auto-scaling group to deploy new instances as demand increases
- B
Add more CPU and memory to the existing web server each time utilization increases
- C
Require administrators to manually build and configure new servers whenever traffic rises
- D
Deploy a single larger perimeter firewall and keep the application on one backend server
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is to use a hardened golden image with auto-scaling. In Security+ contexts, scalability is not just about performance; it also includes maintaining security consistently as systems grow. Golden images, templates, or standardized machine images help ensure each new instance includes required patches, secure configuration baselines, logging, and security tooling. Auto-scaling then supports elasticity during demand spikes without relying on manual intervention. This aligns with industry best practices for immutable or standardized infrastructure and helps reduce configuration drift. Guidance from organizations such as NIST emphasizes secure configuration baselines, standardized builds, and automation to improve consistency and reduce human error. While vertical scaling and manual provisioning may appear simpler, they are less effective for securely handling rapid growth and maintaining a repeatable security posture.
- A. Correct.
Correct. A hardened golden image allows the organization to standardize secure configurations, installed patches, baseline monitoring, and required security agents. When combined with an auto-scaling group, new instances can be provisioned automatically and consistently as demand grows. This directly supports secure scalability by reducing configuration drift and minimizing the risk introduced by manual builds.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Adding CPU and memory to an existing server is vertical scaling, which can help temporarily but does not address the need to rapidly scale out while maintaining consistent security baselines across multiple instances. It also creates a potential single point of failure and does not automate secure provisioning.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Manually building servers is slow, error-prone, and likely to produce inconsistent security settings over time. In a high-growth or burst-demand scenario, this approach undermines scalability and increases the chance of misconfigurations, such as missing patches, inconsistent access controls, or absent endpoint protections.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A larger perimeter firewall may improve network capacity at the edge, but it does not solve the application's backend scalability problem. Keeping the application on one backend server limits availability and performance under load. This option also misunderstands scalability by focusing on only one infrastructure component instead of the full service architecture.