SY0-701 Question 192
Single answerHigh availabilityA company hosts its customer-facing web application in a single on-premises data center. During a recent hardware failure, the application was unavailable for two hours while administrators manually rebuilt the failed server from backups. Management now wants to improve availability for this application without changing how users access it. The security team also wants a solution that reduces single points of failure at the server layer and supports maintenance with minimal downtime. Which of the following is the BEST solution?
- A
Deploy two web servers behind a load balancer in an active-active configuration
- B
Increase the backup frequency from nightly to hourly
- C
Install a host-based firewall on the existing web server
- D
Move the application logs to a separate storage volume
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
High availability focuses on keeping services accessible despite failures and during planned maintenance. In this scenario, the key issue is a single point of failure at the server layer. An active-active cluster of web servers behind a load balancer is the best fit because it provides redundancy and failover transparency to users without requiring them to change how they connect. This aligns with common high-availability best practices used in enterprise environments: redundancy, fault tolerance, and removal of single points of failure. By contrast, backups support disaster recovery and restoration, not continuous availability. Security+ objectives commonly distinguish between availability technologies such as clustering, load balancing, and redundancy versus recovery technologies such as backups. Industry guidance from sources such as NIST contingency planning and resilience practices also emphasizes designing redundant components to maintain operations during hardware failures and maintenance windows.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Placing multiple web servers behind a load balancer in an active-active configuration is a standard high-availability design that removes the web server as a single point of failure. If one server fails, the load balancer can continue sending traffic to the remaining healthy node. This also supports patching and maintenance with minimal user impact because one node can be serviced while the other continues handling requests.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. More frequent backups may reduce data loss and improve recovery point objectives (RPO), but backups do not provide high availability. The application would still go offline if the single server fails, and administrators would still need time to restore or rebuild the system.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A host-based firewall is an important security control, but it does not address availability requirements caused by a single-server architecture. The outage in the scenario was due to hardware failure, not lack of local traffic filtering.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Separating logs onto another volume may help with storage management or forensic retention, but it does not eliminate the server-layer single point of failure. If the web server hardware fails, the application still becomes unavailable.