Welcome to today’s practice test!
Today’s practice test is based on Domain 3.4 (Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture) from the CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 objectives.
This beginner-level practice test is inspired by the CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) exam and is designed to help you reinforce key cybersecurity concepts on a daily basis.
These questions are not official exam questions, but they reflect topics and scenarios relevant to the Security+ certification. Use them to test your knowledge, identify areas for improvement, and build daily cybersecurity habits.
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Results
#1. A security administrator at a financial firm is implementing a fault-tolerant system designed to distribute traffic evenly across multiple servers to ensure uptime. Which approach is the administrator using?
#2. A multinational company is choosing between AWS, Azure, and GCP for different services to reduce single-vendor dependency. Which concept does this illustrate?
#3. An enterprise uses a facility that has basic infrastructure but lacks current data or real-time synchronization. This site will be used if the primary fails. What type of site is this?
#4. Which backup method allows for near real-time replication and faster restoration compared to traditional backup techniques?
#5. Which of the following exercises best tests an organization’s readiness by mimicking a disaster and observing response procedures?
#6. A data center implements diesel generators and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to maintain operations during power outages. Which concept does this support?
#7. A hospital has mirrored its data center in another state, enabling seamless transition with zero downtime. What is this setup called?
#8. Which of the following ensures the system’s data is preserved and can be reconstituted after a crash?
#9. Which recovery solution offers the lowest recovery time objective (RTO)?
#10. A company needs to ensure operational continuity even if one data center is offline due to a disaster. Which is the most cost-effective option?
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To view CompTIA Security+ practice tests on other days, click here.To view answers and explanations for today’s questions, expand the Answers accordion below.
Answers
| Number | Answer | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | C | Load balancing distributes workloads across multiple systems to ensure high availability and reliability. Clustering combines servers to act as a single system, but not always for load distribution. Geographic dispersion focuses on physical location redundancy. A warm site is a preconfigured backup site, but not a live traffic solution. |
| 2 | B | When a company intentionally uses services from more than one public cloud provider (like AWS, Azure, and GCP) to avoid relying too heavily on a single vendor, it is employing a multi-cloud strategy. Data sovereignty relates to data being subject to the laws and regulations of the country where it is stored, not the use of multiple cloud vendors. Onsite backup involves storing data copies locally at the company’s own premises, not utilizing different cloud providers. Parallel processing is a computing method where multiple calculations are carried out simultaneously, typically to speed up task completion, and is unrelated to choosing multiple cloud vendors. |
| 3 | C | A cold site is a basic, empty facility with minimal infrastructure (power, cooling, network connectivity) but no active hardware, data, or real-time synchronization. It’s the least expensive and takes the longest to become operational after a disaster. A hot site is fully equipped with hardware, data, and real-time synchronization, allowing for immediate failover. A warm site has basic hardware and connectivity but requires some setup and data restoration, making it operational faster than a cold site but slower than a hot site. DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is a cloud-based offering where a third-party manages DR, abstracting the site type, but it typically offers capabilities similar to a warm or hot site, not a minimal “cold” setup. |
| 4 | B | A snapshot captures the state of a system or virtual machine at a specific point in time, enabling near real-time replication and very fast restoration by essentially reverting to that captured state. A full backup copies all selected data, taking significant time and space, and is not for near real-time replication. Tape backups are traditional, slow, and primarily used for long-term archival, not fast restoration or real-time replication. An incremental backup only copies data that has changed since the last any type of backup, reducing backup time but requiring the full and all subsequent incrementals for restoration, making recovery slower than a snapshot. |
| 5 | A | A simulation exercise best tests readiness by actively mimicking a disaster scenario and having the response team execute and observe the actual recovery procedures in a controlled environment. A tabletop exercise is a discussion-based drill, where participants talk through a scenario without actual system involvement or real-time procedure execution. Failover is a specific technical action of switching to a backup system, not a comprehensive exercise type for organizational readiness. Journaling is a data recovery technique (recording changes), not a disaster recovery exercise. |
| 6 | A | Implementing diesel generators and UPS systems provides duplicate or backup power sources, directly supporting redundancy planning to ensure continuous operation in case of primary power failure. Backup encryption is a security measure to protect data at rest in backups, unrelated to power supply. Data masking is a technique to obscure sensitive data for non-production environments, unrelated to power supply. Obfuscation is a method to make code or data harder to understand, unrelated to power supply. |
| 7 | B | A hot site is a fully equipped, mirrored data center with real-time data synchronization, allowing for immediate and seamless transition with virtually zero downtime if the primary site fails. A cold site is a basic facility with infrastructure but no active hardware or data, requiring significant time to become operational. Backup rotation is a strategy for managing backup media over time, not a type of disaster recovery site. Platform diversity involves using different technology platforms to avoid single points of failure, but it doesn’t describe a mirrored, real-time data center setup. |
| 8 | A | Journaling (in file systems or databases) records changes before they are actually committed to the main data store. This log of transactions allows the system to recover or “reconstitute” data to a consistent state after a crash by replaying or rolling back incomplete operations. Obfuscation makes data or code harder to understand, primarily for security against reverse engineering, not for data preservation after a crash. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive substitutes (tokens) for security and compliance, not for recovering data after a system crash. Data masking replaces sensitive data with realistic, non-sensitive data, typically for testing or development environments, and is not for preserving/reconstituting data after a crash. |
| 9 | C | A hot site is a fully replicated and synchronized facility designed for immediate failover, offering the lowest possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO) with near-zero downtime. A cold site is a basic, empty facility that requires significant time to set up and restore data, resulting in a very high RTO. A warm site has some hardware but still needs data restoration and configuration, offering a moderate RTO, higher than a hot site. Tape backup is a storage method that involves physical retrieval and lengthy data restoration processes, leading to a high RTO for full system recovery. |
| 10 | A | A cold site is the most cost-effective option. It’s a basic facility with infrastructure but no active hardware or synchronized data, meaning it’s cheaper to maintain than other sites, though it requires significant time and effort to become operational after a disaster. A hot site is fully equipped and synchronized for immediate failover, offering the fastest recovery but at a significantly higher cost. Snapshot backup is a data recovery method for specific systems or data, not a solution for bringing an entire offline data center back to operational continuity. Live migration is for moving running systems between active hosts, typically within or between highly connected data centers, not for recovering an entire data center offline due to a major disaster. |