Free Resilience and Recovery practice questions
10 free SY0-801 questions on Resilience and Recovery, each with a full explanation — no account needed. This section sits in the Security Architecture part of the exam. Answer every question to see your score, then read the lessons below for anything you missed.
A recovery site has servers and network connections installed, but its data isn't current, so the team must restore recent backups before users can work. Which type of site is this?
A warm site has hardware and connectivity in place but needs recent backups restored and services started, which usually takes hours to a few days. A hot site already holds current data kept in sync by replication, and a cold site offers only space, power, cooling and network drops.
A company keeps a database replica running in the cloud at all times and launches its application servers there only when it declares a disaster. Which cloud recovery pattern is this?
In a pilot light design, core pieces such as the database replica run all the time and the rest is launched on demand, which is close to a warm site. Warm standby is the tempting choice, but it keeps a scaled-down yet complete copy running continuously, while backup and restore builds everything after the event.
An attacker who takes over a company's cloud account deletes both production and the cloud recovery environment kept in that account. Which design would BEST have protected the recovery environment?
If an attacker controls the account or the identity provider behind it, everything in that account can be deleted, so recovery copies belong in a separate account with separate credentials. Another region or an active/active design in the same account sits under the same compromised control, and quotas matter only for a large failover.
Ransomware operators reach the hypervisor management console at the primary site and encrypt every virtual machine. The recovery site's virtual machines are managed from the same console with the same admin credentials. Which change BEST keeps one compromise from reaching both sites?
When both sites share one hypervisor console and its credentials, one compromise reaches every virtual machine, so a separate management plane with separate credentials, or a different platform, breaks that common cause. A hotter site doesn't protect against damage that reaches it too, and distance or hardware diversity guard against other kinds of failure.
A faulty security agent update crashes every Windows server in production within minutes. The recovery site runs the same agent on the same update channel and crashes too. Which practice would BEST have kept the recovery site running?
Production and recovery shared the same agent and update channel, a common-mode failure, so staged update rings keep the recovery tier from taking a bad update the same day. Distance protects against regional disasters and a hotter site shortens downtime, but neither helps when every copy runs the same faulty software.
Lightning strikes near an office, and a brief voltage spike damages equipment even though the power never actually goes out. Which protection is designed specifically to divert spikes like this away from equipment?
A surge protector diverts brief overvoltage spikes away from the equipment it feeds, which is exactly what nearby lightning causes. A UPS is built to carry the load through sags and short outages, even though many models also filter spikes; a generator covers long outages, and redundant power supplies cover a failed supply or a tripped circuit.
A server has two hot-swappable power supplies, both plugged into the same power strip. The strip's breaker trips and the server shuts down. What should have been done?
Redundant power supplies help only when each is fed from a separate circuit, ideally separate A and B feeds from different PDUs and UPS units, because one strip is a single point of failure. A surge protector or a generator doesn't help when the shared strip itself trips.
Users of a load-balanced web application are logged out whenever one web server fails, because their sessions live in that server's memory. What change BEST fixes this?
Keeping sessions in a shared cache or database lets any surviving server pick up a user's session after a failure. The scheduling method and health check interval decide which server gets traffic, not where session data lives, and RAID protects only against a failed disk.
Four web servers sit behind one load balancer that health-checks them and removes any that fail. Which component is still a single point of failure, and how is it usually fixed?
A single load balancer is itself a single point of failure, so load balancers are normally deployed in pairs that share a virtual IP address, moved by a protocol such as VRRP when one fails. The four servers are already redundant, and changing health check timing or scheduling doesn't remove the lone device in front of them.
A company runs its application across several availability zones in two regions of one cloud provider. Which failure is it still exposed to?
Spreading across zones and regions of one provider covers the loss of a data center or a region, but not a provider-wide failure or a compromise of the company's account with that provider, which only multicloud addresses. A failed disk is handled by storage redundancy such as RAID.
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Every lesson that covers Resilience and Recovery on the SY0-801 exam.