IBM Assessment: Cloud Computing Architecture Intermediate Practice Exam: Medium Difficulty 2025

A financial services company is migrating their on-premises applications to the cloud. They need to ensure data residency compliance while maintaining high availability across multiple geographic locations. The application requires consistent low latency for users in North America and Europe. Which cloud architecture approach best addresses these requirements?

An e-commerce platform experiences predictable traffic spikes during holiday seasons and flash sales. The development team wants to optimize costs while maintaining performance. Which combination of cloud services and strategies would be most effective?

A healthcare organization is designing a cloud-based patient records system. The architecture must support ACID transactions for critical data, provide real-time analytics on patient trends, and scale to handle millions of records. Which database strategy should the architect recommend?

A company is implementing a microservices architecture in the cloud. Services need to communicate asynchronously, handle temporary service failures gracefully, and ensure messages are not lost during processing. Which messaging pattern and service combination provides the best solution?

An organization needs to provide third-party developers secure access to specific cloud resources without sharing long-term credentials. The solution must support fine-grained permissions and automatic credential expiration. Which approach should be implemented?

A company must ensure their cloud infrastructure meets PCI DSS compliance for processing credit card transactions. The security team needs to implement controls for data protection both at rest and in transit. Which combination of security measures is most appropriate?

During a security audit, it was discovered that several cloud storage buckets containing sensitive customer data are publicly accessible. The organization needs to prevent this from happening again across all environments. What combination of controls should be implemented?

A development team is designing a cloud-native application that must handle variable workloads efficiently and minimize infrastructure management overhead. The application consists of event-driven processing tasks that run for 2-5 minutes each. Which architectural approach is most suitable?

An application running in the cloud needs to maintain session state for users, but individual application instances can be terminated and replaced at any time due to auto-scaling. How should session state be managed to ensure reliability and performance?

A company is migrating a monolithic application to the cloud and wants to improve its resilience and deployment flexibility. The application has tightly coupled components but cannot be completely rewritten immediately. Which migration strategy provides the best balance of improvement and feasibility?