AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a critical web application on Azure App Service in a single region. They need to achieve high availability across regions with automatic failover in the event of a regional outage. Which approach should they recommend?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Deploy to multiple regions with Azure Front Door. Azure Front Door provides global load balancing and automatic failover across multiple regions by routing traffic to the nearest healthy backend. For a critical web application requiring cross-region high availability, deploying App Service instances in multiple regions behind Front Door ensures seamless failover during a regional outage, as Front Door monitors endpoint health and redirects traffic away from failed regions.

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Deploy multiple App Service instances in the same region with Traffic Manager

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Use App Service auto-scaling rules to handle increased load

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Enable Azure Site Recovery for the App Service

Question 2

A company runs multiple on-premises workloads that are critical. They need a disaster recovery solution that can replicate workloads to Azure and enable failover in the event of an on-premises outage. The solution must support non-VMware and non-Hyper-V physical servers. Which Azure service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the correct service because it provides orchestrated replication and failover for on-premises physical servers (including non-VMware, non-Hyper-V) to Azure. It supports physical-to-Azure (P2A) replication using the Mobility service installed on the source server, enabling automated failover during an outage. This directly meets the requirement for critical workload disaster recovery with failover capability.

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Azure Backup

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Azure Migrate

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Azure Disaster Recovery

Question 3

A company wants to back up their Azure VMs (running Windows and Linux) to a Recovery Services vault. The backup data must be encrypted at rest using customer-managed keys. They also need to retain monthly backups for 5 years for compliance. Which configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

A. Azure Backup encrypts backup data using customer-managed keys by configuring encryption on the Recovery Services vault with a key from Azure Key Vault. ADE/DES are for VM disk encryption, not for backup data. The vault's CMK setting is the correct method.

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B

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C

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D

Question 4

A company runs a critical application on an Azure virtual machine in the West US region. They want to enable disaster recovery to East US with the ability to perform non-disruptive DR drills. They need an RPO of a few minutes. Which Azure service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the correct service because it provides continuous replication of Azure VMs from a primary region (West US) to a secondary region (East US) with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of a few minutes. It also supports non-disruptive disaster recovery drills by allowing you to perform test failovers in an isolated network without impacting the production workload.

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Azure Backup

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Azure Traffic Manager

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Azure Blueprints

Question 5

A company runs a three-tier application on Azure VMs in the West US region. They want to enable disaster recovery to East US using Azure Site Recovery. The application requires that the web tier starts first, then the application tier, and finally the database tier after a consistency check. They also need to be able to perform non-disruptive DR drills. Which Azure Site Recovery capabilities should they use together?

Accepted Answer

Recovery Plan with pre/post actions and Test Failover. A Recovery Plan in Azure Site Recovery allows you to define the startup order of tiers (web, app, database) using pre-actions and post-actions, which can invoke Azure Automation runbooks or scripts to perform the consistency check. Test Failover enables non-disruptive DR drills by creating an isolated copy of the replicated VMs in East US without impacting the production environment. Together, these capabilities meet both the ordered startup and drill requirements.

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Network mapping and IP customization

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Replication policy with crash-consistent snapshots

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Azure Automation runbooks and Azure Monitor alerts

Question 6

A company runs SQL Server on an Azure virtual machine. They need to automate database backups with application-consistency and retain backups for 10 years to meet compliance. They also want to restore to any point in time within the last 35 days. Which Azure Backup solution should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Backup for SQL Server in Azure VM. Azure Backup for SQL Server in Azure VM (Option A) is correct because it provides native application-consistent backups for SQL Server databases running on Azure VMs, supports long-term retention (LTR) up to 10 years using the backup vault's retention rules, and enables point-in-time restore (PITR) for the last 35 days by leveraging SQL Server transaction log backups. This solution is specifically designed for SQL Server workloads and meets both compliance and recovery requirements without additional infrastructure.

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Azure Backup for Azure VM

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Azure Site Recovery

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SQL Server Always On Availability Groups

Question 7

A company runs a critical application that uses Azure SQL Managed Instance in the West Europe region. They need to ensure that the database remains available if a regional failure occurs. The solution must provide automatic failover with an RPO of less than 5 seconds and an RTO of less than 1 minute. The secondary region must also be able to serve read-only queries for reporting purposes. Which Azure service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Deploy SQL Server Always On Availability Groups with a synchronous replica in North Europe.. Auto-failover groups for Azure SQL Managed Instance provide automatic failover and readable secondaries, but they are designed for an RPO of 5 seconds and an RTO of about 1 hour. This does not satisfy the required RTO of <1 minute. To achieve the required RPO and RTO, a synchronous replica with automatic failover is needed, which is provided by SQL Server Always On Availability Groups on IaaS VMs (option C). This configuration can have an RPO of 0 (synchronous commit) and an RTO of seconds, and the secondary can be configured to accept read-only queries.

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Configure Azure SQL Managed Instance with an auto-failover group to a secondary instance in North Europe.

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Enable read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) on the storage account hosting the database files.

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Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the SQL Managed Instance to a secondary region as a virtual machine.

Question 8

A company backs up their Azure VMs using Azure Backup. They need to meet compliance that requires backups to be stored in a separate geographic region. Additionally, they want to be able to restore the entire VM to that secondary region in case of a regional disaster. What should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Use a Recovery Services vault with Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) and enable cross-region restore. Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault using Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) replicates backup data to a paired secondary region, meeting the compliance requirement for geographic separation. Enabling cross-region restore allows the entire VM to be restored in that secondary region during a regional disaster, as the backup data is already available there.

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Use a Recovery Services vault with Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) and enable cross-region restore

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Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the entire VM to the secondary region

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Manually copy backup snapshots to a storage account in the secondary region

Question 9

A company runs a critical web application on Azure App Service in a single region. They need to achieve high availability across regions with automatic failover in the event of a regional outage. Which approach should they recommend?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication and an auto-failover group. Active geo-replication with an auto-failover group is the correct choice because it provides automatic, asynchronous replication of data to a secondary region with an RPO of 5 seconds (typically under 5 seconds) and an RTO of 1 minute when the failover group is configured with a grace period. Additionally, the secondary replica can be used for read-only queries by connecting with ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly, meeting the reporting requirement.

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Azure SQL Database with geo-restore

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Azure SQL Database with a standby replica

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Azure SQL Database with cross-region failover

Question 10

A company runs a multi-tier application on Azure VMs in the West US region. The application has web, application, and database tiers. They want to use Azure Site Recovery for disaster recovery to East US. They need to ensure that after failover, the web tier starts first, then the application tier, and finally the database tier after a consistency check. They also need to be able to perform non-disruptive DR drills. Which Azure Site Recovery capabilities should they use together?

Accepted Answer

Create a recovery plan with custom groups and scripts for startup order, and use test failover for DR drills. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) recovery plans allow you to define custom groups and scripts to control the startup order of VMs after failover. By placing the web, application, and database tiers into separate groups with pre- and post-actions (e.g., PowerShell scripts), you can ensure the web tier starts first, then the application tier, and finally the database tier after a consistency check. ASR's test failover capability performs a non-disruptive DR drill by creating isolated copies of VMs in a separate VNet without impacting the production environment.

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Use Azure Backup for the VMs and restore them in order after failover

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Use an availability set to control startup order and use disaster recovery drills in a separate VNet

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Use Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic after failover and manually start VMs in order