A business-critical storage account must keep data available if one availability zone fails in the primary region. It must also keep a readable copy in the paired region so administrators can verify data during disaster recovery testing before failover. Which redundancy option should be selected?

LRS, because it stores three copies in one datacenter and is the lowest-cost option.

LRS protects against local disk or node failures, but all copies stay within one datacenter. It does not provide zone resilience or a readable secondary replica in another region. This does not satisfy the business continuity requirement.

ZRS, because it replicates data across zones in the same region but not to another region.

ZRS helps with a zone failure in the primary region, but it does not create a secondary regional copy. Administrators would not have a read-accessible replica in the paired region for disaster recovery verification. The cross-region requirement is missing.

GRS, because it replicates to the paired region and supports a secondary copy for recovery.

GRS does replicate to a paired region, but the secondary copy is not readable. The scenario explicitly requires administrators to verify data in the secondary region before failover, which GRS does not provide. Read access is the key missing feature.

What does this AZ-104 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: RA-GZRS, because it provides zone redundancy in the primary region and read access to the secondary region. — RA-GZRS is the only option listed that covers both layers of resilience in the scenario. Zone redundancy protects against a datacenter or zone failure inside the primary region, while geo-replication protects against a regional outage. The read-access feature is important because the team wants to verify the replicated data before failover, not just rely on an unavailable standby copy. Why others are wrong: LRS is only local redundancy and does not handle zone or regional failure. ZRS handles zone failure but has no secondary region copy. GRS adds geo-replication but the secondary copy is not readable. The question requires both zone resilience and secondary read access, which only RA-GZRS provides among the options.

What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.