Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)Cloud Security OperationsMedium

A cloud security engineer is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application hosted in a public cloud. The application requires near-instantaneous recovery with minimal data loss. Which of the following disaster recovery strategies would best meet these requirements?

  1. ABackup and Restore
  2. BWarm Standby
  3. CPilot Light
  4. DMulti-region Active-Active
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D. Multi-region Active-Active

Multi-region Active-Active provides the highest availability and lowest RTO/RPO by running the application simultaneously in multiple regions, allowing for immediate failover with no data loss.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Backup and Restore has the highest RTO and RPO, making it unsuitable for near-instantaneous recovery with minimal data loss.
  • B. Warm Standby keeps a scaled-down version of the application running in the recovery region, which still requires scaling up and DNS changes during a disaster.
  • C. Pilot Light maintains a minimal, core infrastructure in the recovery region, requiring some time to provision full resources.

Multi-region Active-Active DR

A disaster recovery strategy where the full application stack is deployed and actively serving traffic in two or more geographically separate cloud regions simultaneously.

  • Provides highest availability and lowest RTO/RPO.
  • Traffic is distributed across regions, and in case of a regional outage, traffic is immediately rerouted.
  • Requires complex synchronization and higher operational costs.

Memory trick: Active-Active is always ready, like two busy bees.

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