CompTIA SecurityX (CAS-005)Security ArchitectureHard
A security architect is designing a new payment processing system that must achieve extreme fault tolerance and high availability. The system needs to continue operating without any data loss or service interruption, even if an entire regional data center becomes unavailable. Which strategy provides the highest level of resilience for this scenario?
- AActive-Active Deployment with Regional Load Balancing
- BActive-Passive Deployment with Warm Standby
- CDaily Backups with Off-site Storage
- DGeographic Redundancy with Synchronous Replication
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Geographic Redundancy with Synchronous Replication
Geographic redundancy ensures that identical infrastructure and data exist in multiple, geographically distinct locations. Combined with synchronous replication, this strategy guarantees that all data is committed to both sites before a transaction is finalized, thus preventing data loss and allowing for immediate failover with near-zero RTO and RPO.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Active-Active deployments can offer high availability but don't inherently guarantee zero data loss across regions without synchronous replication, especially if one region fails mid-transaction.
- B. Active-Passive with warm standby can minimize downtime but typically involves some data loss (non-zero RPO) and a recovery time (RTO) during failover.
- C. Daily backups with off-site storage are for disaster recovery over longer periods and imply significant data loss (up to 24 hours) and recovery time, not suitable for 'extreme fault tolerance' and 'no data loss or service interruption'.
Geographic Redundancy with Synchronous Replication
An architecture where identical systems and data are deployed in multiple, distinct geographical regions, with data synchronized in real-time to ensure zero data loss and continuous operation during a regional outage.
- Provides the highest level of disaster recovery and business continuity.
- Achieves RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of zero and near-zero RTO (Recovery Time Objective).
- Requires significant network bandwidth and can introduce latency due to synchronous data commits across distances.
Memory trick: Geo-Sync: Global Strength, Zero Loss.