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ISC2 CC 2.2 CompTIA Security+ 3.4 ISC2 CISSP 7.10 NIST CSF PR.IR-03 NIST CSF PR.DS-11 NIST 800-53 CP-9
TechKnowSurge Catalog Interactives What Keeps You Running?
InteractiveSecurityFree

What Keeps You Running?

Something failed and the service survived. Which protection did it?

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

About this interactive

High availability comes from redundancy wherever a system depends on something, and from backups for what redundancy cannot fix. Power: a UPS has a battery that takes over the moment the wall power fails, enough for minutes; a backup generator starts up and supplies power for as long as the outage lasts. Dual power supplies on separate power bars and circuits guard against a failed supply or bar. Servers and services: clustering lets another server take over when one goes down, as a secondary database does for a failed primary. A load balancer spreads connections across servers and stops sending traffic to any that fail its checks. Disks: RAID 1 mirrors, RAID 5 and 6 add parity, RAID 10 mirrors and stripes, so a failed disk does not stop the server. Location: servers in several availability zones carry on when one zone fails; a second region, a second cloud provider, or a hot, warm or cold site covers losing more, through disaster recovery. Backups: replication, mirroring and hot sites all copy every change as it happens, so they copy a mistaken deletion, a corruption or ransomware too. A backup is a point-in-time copy, which is why it can bring back what was there before.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

ISC2 CC
2.2 Understand redundancy
CompTIA Security+
3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.
ISC2 CISSP
7.10 Implement recovery strategies
NIST CSF
PR.IR-03 Mechanisms are implemented to achieve resilience requirements in normal and adverse situations.
PR.DS-11 Backups of data are created, protected, maintained, and tested.
NIST 800-53
CP-9 System Backup

Key terms

Uninterruptible Power Supply
UPS
A battery-backed power device that provides continuous power to connected equipment during utility power outages or voltage fluctuations, allowing safe shutdown or continued operation. UPS units are essential for servers and critical infrastructure to prevent data loss.
Backup Generator
A fuel-powered electrical generator that activates during a utility power outage to supply sustained power to critical systems.
Clustering
A configuration where multiple servers or nodes work together as a single logical system to provide high availability, load balancing, or both, so that service continues if one node fails.
Load Balancer
A device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure availability and performance.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks
RAID
A data storage technology that combines multiple physical drives into a logical unit to improve performance, provide redundancy, or both, depending on the RAID level chosen. Common levels include RAID 0 (striping for speed), RAID 1 (mirroring for redundancy), and RAID 5 (striping with parity).
Location Redundancy
The practice of distributing duplicate systems or services across geographically separate sites to protect against localized failures or disasters.
Backup
A copy of data captured at a specific point in time and stored separately from the source system, used to restore information in the event of data loss, corruption, or a security incident such as ransomware.
Replication
The process of copying and continuously synchronizing data from one location to another to ensure availability and fault tolerance in the event of a failure.
Availability Zone
AZ
An isolated physical location within a cloud provider's region with its own independent power, cooling, and networking, used to deploy resources in ways that protect applications from single-datacenter failures.
Cloud Provider Redundancy
A strategy that distributes services across multiple cloud providers to prevent a single provider's outage from causing a complete service disruption.
Hot Site
A fully operational duplicate facility with live systems and current data that can immediately assume workloads if the primary site fails, providing the fastest possible disaster recovery time.
Fault Tolerance
A design property that allows a system to continue operating correctly even when one or more of its components fail, achieved through techniques such as redundancy and failover.

Topics

High Availability Redundancy Backup Location Redundancy Interactive Categorize

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