Even with strong border protection, attackers often bypass perimeter defenses through phishing, stolen credentials, or insider threats. Adopting a Zero Trust architecture improves security by continuously verifying users, devices, and identities regardless of location, significantly reducing incidents beyond the network border.

Horizontal scaling adds more instances automatically as traffic fluctuates, making it the most effective strategy for unpredictable and variable workloads to maintain application availability and performance.

The network is configured with a subnet of /29, which provides only 6 usable IP addresses after accounting for the network and broadcast addresses. With eight individuals needing to connect to their own dedicated VMs, there are not enough IP addresses available to assign to each VM, leading to several users being unable to access their VMs. This issue is not related to misconfigured routes, network traffic, or DHCP functionality, but rather the limited number of IP addresses available in the given subnet.

Identification is the process of discovering or detecting vulnerabilities in systems, applications, or networks. It involves actively looking for and recognizing vulnerabilities before they are assessed or remediated.

Elevated response times without reported issues or changes internally could indicate a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, where multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers.