Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Practice Exam

What term refers to a system's ability to stay operational during abnormal conditions?

1. Availability

2. Resiliency

3. Both

4. None

The correct answer is: Resiliency

The term that refers to a system's ability to stay operational during abnormal conditions is resiliency. Resiliency encompasses the system's capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and maintain functionality even when faced with unexpected challenges, such as hardware failures, cyberattacks, or natural disasters. It emphasizes the importance of designing systems that can withstand disruptions and continue to provide services with minimal downtime. While availability is also an important concept, it specifically focuses on the system's operational uptime and readiness to serve requests at any given time. Availability does not inherently include the ability to recover from failures or adapt to abnormal situations, which is why resiliency is the more appropriate term for the context of enduring abnormal conditions. Resiliency includes measures such as redundancy, failover processes, and effective incident response strategies, making it a crucial aspect of system design in the cloud environment and broader IT landscape.