AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A multinational corporation is designing a data storage solution for its global customer data. The data must be stored in the Azure region closest to each customer to minimize latency, but all data must be accessible from a central analytics platform for reporting. The solution must also comply with data residency regulations that require customer data to remain in the country of origin. Which Azure storage solution should the company recommend?

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

Accepted Answer

Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication. Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication allows the creation of a primary database in a central region and readable secondary databases in other regions. This enables low-latency reads for customers by serving data from the closest secondary while respecting data residency because the primary remains in the country of origin and replicas can be limited to the same country. The central analytics platform can query the primary database for reporting. This solution avoids the global replication that would violate residency requirements.

Answer

Azure Cosmos DB with multi-master writes and conflict resolution

Answer

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 with geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)

Answer

Azure Blob Storage with geo-redundant storage (GRS)

Question 2

A company is designing a solution for storing sensitive financial records that must be retained for 7 years. The solution must meet the following requirements: - Data must be immutable during the retention period. - After the retention period, data must be automatically deleted. - The solution must minimize storage costs. Which two Azure services should the company use? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management. Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management (B) is correct because it allows you to define rules to automatically delete blobs after a specified period, such as 7 years, minimizing storage costs by tiering or expiring data. Azure Blob Storage with immutable storage policy (D) is correct because it enforces WORM (Write Once, Read Many) immutability, preventing data modification or deletion during the retention period, which is essential for sensitive financial records.

Answer

Microsoft Purview Data Map

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Azure NetApp Files with replication

Answer

Azure Files with snapshots

Question 3

A startup needs a cost-effective data storage solution for its application logs. The logs are accessed infrequently but must be available for audit purposes for up to 3 years. The solution should minimize storage costs while allowing data retrieval within 24 hours when needed. Which Azure storage tier should the company recommend?

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage Archive tier. The Archive tier is the most cost-effective option for data that is infrequently accessed and requires retrieval times of up to 15 hours (standard) or 24 hours (high-priority). Since the logs must be available within 24 hours and stored for up to 3 years, Archive meets both the cost and retrieval requirements, as it offers the lowest storage cost among Azure Blob Storage tiers.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Cool tier

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Azure Blob Storage Hot tier

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Premium tier

Question 4

You are designing a data storage solution for a global e-commerce platform that handles millions of transactions per day. The platform uses Azure Cosmos DB for its transactional data. The company wants to implement a real-time analytics pipeline to monitor sales trends and detect anomalies. The analytics must be performed on the transactional data with minimal latency (under 5 seconds). The solution must not impact the transactional workload's performance. The analytics queries involve aggregations over time windows and joins with reference data stored in Azure SQL Database. You need to recommend a solution. Which option should you choose?

Accepted Answer

Use Azure Cosmos DB change feed to stream data to Azure Stream Analytics, which performs the aggregations and joins with reference data from Azure SQL Database.. Azure Cosmos DB change feed enables real-time streaming of transactional data to Azure Stream Analytics, which can perform low-latency aggregations and joins with reference data from Azure SQL Database without impacting the transactional workload. This architecture meets the sub-5-second latency requirement and avoids any direct query load on Cosmos DB.

Answer

Enable Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB and use Synapse serverless SQL to query the transactional data directly.

Answer

Use Azure Data Factory to copy data from Cosmos DB to Azure Synapse Analytics every minute, and run analytics queries in Synapse.

Answer

Use Azure Databricks with Auto Loader to incrementally load data from Cosmos DB into Delta Lake, and then query with Spark SQL.

Question 5

A healthcare company is designing a data storage solution for its electronic health records (EHR) system. The system must store patient data in Azure SQL Database with high availability. The solution must meet the following requirements: - Data must be stored in the East US region with automatic failover to a secondary region in West US in case of a regional outage. - The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 5 seconds. - The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) must be less than 1 hour. - The solution must minimize costs while meeting the RPO and RTO. Which Azure SQL Database configuration should the company recommend?

Accepted Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication to a secondary server in West US. Configure automatic failover using a failover group.. Active geo-replication with a failover group provides automatic, asynchronous replication to a secondary region (West US) with an RPO of less than 5 seconds and an RTO of less than 1 hour. This configuration meets the high-availability and disaster recovery requirements while minimizing costs compared to higher-tier options.

Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database Managed Instance with failover group to a secondary instance in West US.

Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier with auto-failover group and a secondary replica in a different availability zone within East US.

Answer

Deploy Azure SQL Database General Purpose tier with zone-redundant configuration.

Question 6

A company is designing a data storage solution for its IoT devices that generate telemetry data. The data is ingested at high velocity (millions of events per second) and must be stored for real-time dashboards and historical analysis. The solution must also support complex event processing and alerting. Which two Azure services should the company use together? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Azure Event Hubs. Azure Event Hubs is the correct choice because it is a high-throughput data ingestion service designed to handle millions of events per second from IoT devices, providing low-latency, durable event capture for real-time dashboards and historical analysis. Azure Stream Analytics is the correct companion service because it natively integrates with Event Hubs to perform complex event processing (CEP), such as pattern matching, aggregation, and alerting, on the streaming telemetry data in real time.

Answer

Azure IoT Hub

Answer

Azure Synapse Analytics

Answer

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Question 7

A gaming company is developing a multiplayer online game that requires a low-latency data store for player profiles, inventory, and session state. The data is accessed globally, and the solution must support millions of concurrent players. The company expects write-heavy workloads with occasional reads. The solution must provide single-digit millisecond latency for reads and writes. The company also needs to run analytics on the data to understand player behavior, but analytics queries can tolerate higher latency (minutes). Which Azure data storage solution should the company recommend for the transactional data?

Accepted Answer

Azure Cosmos DB with multiple write regions. Azure Cosmos DB with multiple write regions is the correct choice because it provides global distribution with multi-master writes, delivering single-digit millisecond latency for both reads and writes at any scale. It supports millions of concurrent players via automatic and elastic scaling, and its change feed enables analytics with higher latency tolerance by streaming data to Azure Synapse or HDInsight without impacting transactional performance.

Answer

Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication

Answer

Azure Redis Cache with persistence

Answer

Azure Table Storage with geo-redundancy

Question 8

A company is designing a storage solution for its backup data. The backups must be stored for 10 years for compliance reasons. The solution should minimize storage costs while ensuring data durability. Which two Azure services should the company consider? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage Archive tier. Azure Blob Storage Archive tier is correct because it provides the lowest-cost storage for data that is rarely accessed, with a 10-year retention period meeting compliance requirements. It offers 11 nines of durability (99.999999999%) by storing multiple copies across Azure regions, ensuring data integrity over the long term.

Answer

Azure Files with snapshots

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Azure NetApp Files with cross-region replication

Answer

Azure Disk Storage with incremental snapshots

Question 9

A media company is designing a storage solution for its large video files (average 50 GB each) that are edited by multiple users simultaneously. The solution must support SMB protocol for compatibility with existing editing software and provide low-latency access. The files must be stored in a highly available configuration across multiple availability zones in a single region. Which Azure storage solution should the company recommend?

Accepted Answer

Azure Files Premium tier with zone-redundant storage (ZRS). Azure Files Premium tier supports SMB protocol natively, which is required for compatibility with existing editing software. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates data synchronously across three availability zones within a single region, providing high availability and low-latency access for simultaneous editing of large video files.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Premium tier with geo-redundant storage (GRS)

Answer

Azure Disk Storage with shared disks

Answer

Azure NetApp Files Premium tier with cross-zone replication

Question 10

A small business is migrating its on-premises file server to Azure. The file server contains 2 TB of data that is accessed infrequently. The business wants to minimize costs and only pay for storage used. The solution must support SMB protocol and allow for on-premises caching to reduce latency. Which Azure storage solution should the business recommend?

Accepted Answer

Azure Files Standard tier with Azure File Sync. Azure Files Standard tier with Azure File Sync is correct because it provides fully managed SMB file shares in the cloud, supports the required SMB protocol, and Azure File Sync enables on-premises caching to reduce latency. The Standard tier is cost-effective for infrequently accessed data, and the pay-as-you-go model minimizes costs by charging only for actual storage used.

Answer

Azure Disk Storage Standard HDD with shared disks

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Azure NetApp Files Standard tier with cross-region replication

Answer

Azure Blob Storage Cool tier with Azure Storage Explorer

Question 11

A company stores sensitive customer data in Azure Blob Storage. They need to ensure that data at rest is encrypted using a customer-managed key stored in Azure Key Vault. Which of the following should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Storage Service Encryption with customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault. Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) encrypts data at rest in Azure Blob Storage. When configured with customer-managed keys (CMK) stored in Azure Key Vault, the customer controls the encryption key lifecycle, including rotation and revocation, meeting the requirement for customer-managed key control. This is the only option that directly applies to Blob Storage data at rest with CMK support.

Answer

Azure Disk Encryption

Answer

Azure Storage Service Encryption with Microsoft-managed keys

Answer

Azure Information Protection

Question 12

Refer to the exhibit. You have an Azure Storage account with hierarchical namespace enabled. You create this JSON policy to assign to a container. Users report that they can access the container from any IP, not just the specified range. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

IP address conditions are not supported in RBAC for Azure Storage data plane operations. RBAC roles for Azure Storage data plane operations do not support IP address conditions in role assignments. IP address conditions are only supported for Azure Resource Manager (control plane) RBAC roles, not for data plane operations like accessing blob or container data. Since the policy uses RBAC with an IP condition, the condition is ignored, and access is allowed from any IP.

Answer

Hierarchical namespace disables IP-based restrictions

Answer

Anonymous access is enabled on the container

Answer

The resource scope is incorrect; RBAC cannot be assigned at the container level

Question 13

Which TWO options are valid methods to secure access to Azure Cosmos DB?

Accepted Answer

Azure RBAC roles. Azure RBAC roles (Option C) provide fine-grained, role-based access control to Azure Cosmos DB, allowing you to assign permissions to users, groups, or service principals for operations like read, write, or delete on specific resources. Primary and secondary keys (Option D) are the default authentication method, enabling full access to the Cosmos DB account for data plane operations, and are commonly used for application connections.

Answer

X.509 certificate-based authentication

Answer

Azure Storage account keys

Answer

Shared access signatures (SAS)

Question 14

You are a cloud architect at a healthcare company. They have an existing application running on Azure VMs in a single region. The application uses SQL Server on a VM for its database. The company is migrating to Azure SQL Managed Instance for better manageability and compliance. The database is 2 TB and requires point-in-time restore (PITR) capability with a retention period of 35 days. The workload is critical with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 2 hours. The company wants to minimize costs while meeting these requirements. Which of the following should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Azure SQL Managed Instance with automated backups configured for 35-day retention and a backup storage redundancy of Locally Redundant Storage (LRS). Azure SQL Managed Instance's automated backups with a 35-day retention period and LRS storage meet the PITR requirement while minimizing cost. LRS is the cheapest redundancy option and sufficient for PITR within a single region, as the RPO of 5 minutes is satisfied by the default transaction log backup frequency (every 5-10 minutes). The RTO of 2 hours is achievable by restoring from these backups, and no cross-region replication is needed since the workload is single-region.

Answer

Use Azure SQL Managed Instance with active geo-replication to a secondary region

Answer

Use Azure SQL Managed Instance with long-term retention (LTR) backups

Answer

Use Azure SQL Database with the Hyperscale service tier

Question 15

You are designing a data storage solution for a multi-tenant SaaS application. Each tenant's data must be isolated and encrypted with a tenant-specific key. The solution must support automatic key rotation and the ability to revoke a tenant's access immediately by disabling their key. The data will be stored in Azure Blob Storage. Which two actions should you include in your design? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a separate Azure Key Vault for each tenant and store the tenant's customer-managed key in that vault.. The requirements are per-tenant encryption with tenant-specific keys, automatic key rotation, and immediate revocation by disabling a key. Creating a separate Key Vault per tenant and using encryption scopes in Blob Storage that reference those keys achieves this. Encryption scopes allow different containers or blobs to be encrypted with different keys, and disabling a key in Key Vault immediately blocks access to data encrypted with that key. This design provides strong isolation and meets all requirements.

Answer

Use Azure Disk Encryption with BitLocker for each tenant's virtual machine disks.

Answer

Store all tenant data in a single container and use a single customer-managed key stored in Azure Key Vault Managed HSM.

Answer

Enable Azure Storage Service Encryption with Microsoft-managed keys and use Azure Policy to enforce per-tenant encryption.