Selecting the " I want to protect the cluster " option during the initial NC2 deployment wizard enables the underlying support for theCluster Protectfeature but does not fully finalize the protection policies. Once the bare-metal instances are provisioned and the Nutanix software is initialized, the administrator mustconfigure Cluster Protect after the deployment completes. This " Day Two " configuration involves specifying the Amazon S3 bucket that will serve as the backup target, defining the protection frequency (RPO), and selecting the specific User VMs or Prism Central data to be protected. Since the NCI Ultimate license already includes the advanced replication and protection features by default, no additional add-on purchase is required, but the functional setup of the backup policies remains a mandatory post-deployment task.