AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 836

A company is finalizing the architecture for its backup solution for applications running on AWS. All of the applications run on AWS and use at least two Availability
Zones in each tier.
Company policy requires IT to durably store nightly backups for all its data in at least two locations: production and disaster recovery. The locations must be in different geographic regions. The company also needs the backup to be available to restore immediately at the production data center, and within 24 hours at the disaster recovery location. All backup processes must be fully automated.
What is the MOST cost-effective backup solution that will meet all requirements?

Answer options

• A. Back up all the data to a large Amazon EBS volume attached to the backup media server in the production region. Run automated scripts to snapshot these volumes nightly, and copy these snapshots to the disaster recovery region.
• B. Back up all the data to Amazon S3 in the disaster recovery region. Use a lifecycle policy to move this data to Amazon Glacier in the production region immediately. Only the data is replicated; remove the data from the S3 bucket in the disaster recovery region.
• C. Back up all the data to Amazon Glacier in the production region. Set up cross-region replication of this data to Amazon Glacier in the disaster recovery region. Set up a lifecycle policy to delete any data older than 60 days.
• D. Back up all the data to Amazon S3 in the production region. Set up cross-region replication of this S3 bucket to another region and set up a lifecycle policy in the second region to immediately move this data to Amazon Glacier.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Storing the primary backups in Amazon S3 in the production region ensures that data is available for immediate restoration. Leveraging S3 Cross-Region Replication to copy the data to a secondary region, combined with an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition it to Amazon Glacier, satisfies both the 24-hour DR restoration requirement and minimizes storage costs. Other options are either more expensive, operationally complex, or technically unfeasible because Amazon Glacier does not support direct immediate restores or native cross-region replication.