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Difficulty: HardResilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

An enterprise financial platform maintains an active-passive database cluster across two data centers using synchronous storage replication to satisfy a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero. During a security architecture review, an auditor notes that while synchronous replication protects against site-level hardware failure, a ransomware infection or database corruption on the primary node will instantly mirror to the secondary node, destroying operational integrity across both sites. Which of the following technical solutions best maintains high availability while ensuring recovery capability against logical data corruption?

  1. Maintain synchronous replication for site failover while implementing automated, write-once-read-many (WORM) immutable snapshots and point-in-time recovery backups.Answer
  2. B
    Replace the secondary site replication with RAID 6 array configurations across all database storage nodes to handle data corruption and disk faults locally.
  3. C
    Deploy inline Web Application Firewalls (WAF) in front of both database nodes to serve as a corrective resiliency control that restores database state upon detecting corruption.
  4. D
    Transition from synchronous to asynchronous replication without snapshots so that logical corruptions are delayed from reaching the passive failover site.

Answer

The optimal solution is to maintain synchronous replication for real-time site failover while combining it with automated, immutable (WORM) point-in-time snapshots and backups.
High availability via synchronous replication ensures that site failures result in immediate failover with no data loss (zero RPO). However, replication cannot differentiate between legitimate data writes and logical corruption or ransomware encryption. Adding automated, immutable (WORM) point-in-time snapshots ensures that even if corrupt data is replicated live, administrators can roll back storage to an uncorrupted historical state.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze high availability requirements
Synchronous replication satisfies the zero-RPO site failover requirement by writing transactions to both primary and secondary storage simultaneously.
High availability relies on real-time redundancy to withstand hardware or facility outages.
2
Evaluate the vulnerability of high-availability replication to logical corruption
Live replication channels indiscriminately transmit malicious software changes, unauthorized deletions, or block corruption to secondary nodes immediately.
Fault tolerance mechanisms protect availability against physical failures, not against data corruption.
3
Select a complementary data resilience control
Combining real-time synchronous replication with immutable, read-only point-in-time snapshots creates an air-gapped historical baseline from which clean data can be restored.
Immutable snapshots prevent ransomware or corruption from modifying historical recovery blocks.

Key Concept

Distinction between High Availability / Fault Tolerance and Point-in-Time Data Recovery
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Topics

Resilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

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