Which statement best describes a key trade-off of synchronous replication in a multi-site deployment?

Which statement best describes a key trade-off of synchronous replication in a multi-site deployment?

• A. Higher write latency due to real-time synchronization, but near-zero RPO.
• B. Lower latency but higher RPO and less data protection.
• C. No impact on latency or RPO.
• D. It eliminates the need for backups entirely.

Answer: (A)

Synchronous replication is about making sure every write is confirmed only after it has been replicated to all sites. That real-time synchronization keeps all copies in lockstep, so if a site fails you can recover with almost no data loss—the Recovery Point Objective becomes near zero. The flip side is that the write has to wait for acknowledgments from remote sites, which adds network round-trip time to every operation. In multi-site deployments, this means higher write latency the further apart or the more congested the links are. So the best description of this trade-off is: you gain near-zero RPO at the cost of higher write latency due to the need to synchronize writes across sites in real time. This choice aligns with the goal of strong data protection, while other options would imply lower latency or ignoring the data-loss aspect, which doesn’t reflect synchronous behavior.

Synchronous replication is about making sure every write is confirmed only after it has been replicated to all sites. That real-time synchronization keeps all copies in lockstep, so if a site fails you can recover with almost no data loss—the Recovery Point Objective becomes near zero. The flip side is that the write has to wait for acknowledgments from remote sites, which adds network round-trip time to every operation. In multi-site deployments, this means higher write latency the further apart or the more congested the links are. So the best description of this trade-off is: you gain near-zero RPO at the cost of higher write latency due to the need to synchronize writes across sites in real time. This choice aligns with the goal of strong data protection, while other options would imply lower latency or ignoring the data-loss aspect, which doesn’t reflect synchronous behavior.