What role does redundancy play in a cloud infrastructure?

Redundancy in cloud infrastructure is crucial for ensuring data availability and reliability. By having multiple instances of data or systems, redundancy provides a safeguard against hardware failures, data loss, or disruptions caused by various factors, such as system crashes or site outages. This means that if one component fails, the system can quickly switch to another operational component, thus maintaining service continuity and minimizing downtime.

This reliable access to data is essential for businesses, as it helps in maintaining customer trust and ensures that critical applications function without interruption. Furthermore, redundancy is a part of many cloud service architectures, including data replication across multiple geographic locations, which enhances disaster recovery capabilities and resilience.

In contrast, while other choices mention aspects like data processing speed, cost minimization, or application development simplification, these do not directly relate to the fundamental purpose of redundancy in the context of cloud infrastructure. Redundancy specifically focuses on safeguarding availability and reliability, making it a critical design principle for cloud services.