AZ-104 Implement and Manage Storage Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  GZRS

  Why it's wrong here

  GZRS (Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage) is wrong for this scenario because, although it replicates synchronously across zones and asynchronously to a paired region, it does not enable read access to the secondary region. The 'RA' prefix is required to allow reads against the secondary endpoint; without it, the secondary copy is inaccessible until a Microsoft-initiated or user-initiated failover is performed. For the analytics team, this lack of continuous secondary read access fails the requirement implied by the high-availability setup.

  When this WOULD be correct

  A question that requires data to survive both a zone failure and a regional outage, but does not require read access to the secondary region during an outage (e.g., only needs failover for write access).

• ✓

  RA-GZRS

  Why this is correct

  RA-GZRS (Read-Access Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage) is correct because it synchronously replicates data across three Azure availability zones within the primary region and asynchronously replicates to a secondary paired region, while enabling read access to that secondary endpoint. This gives the analytics team both zone-fault tolerance and regional disaster recovery, plus immediate, independent read access to the geo-replicated copy. It provides the highest availability and durability of all Azure Storage redundancy options.

• ✗

  RA-GRS

  Why it's wrong here

  RA-GRS (Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage) is incorrect because its primary region uses only locally redundant storage (LRS), meaning three synchronous copies exist within a single data center, not across multiple availability zones. While it does offer read access to the secondary region, a failure of an entire availability zone (or any single data center failure) in the primary region would be unrecoverable from a zone-failure perspective. In contrast, RA-GZRS protects at the zone level, which is the differentiating requirement here.

• ✗

  ZRS

  Why it's wrong here

  ZRS (Zone-Redundant Storage) is not enough because it only synchronously replicates data across three availability zones within a single primary region, with no geo-replication to a paired region. A complete regional outage (beyond the loss of individual zones) would leave the analytics reports unavailable and potentially lost, as there is no secondary copy to fail over to. Choosing ZRS would sacrifice the cross-region disaster recovery and geo-read capabilities that RA-GZRS provides.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the question asked for a redundancy option that protects data within a single region against zone failures, without requiring any cross-region replication or read-access during a regional outage, ZRS would be correct. For example: 'You need to ensure data survives a zone failure but do not need regional disaster recovery.'

Option-by-option analysis

Why each answer is right or wrong

Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The AZ-104 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.

Analysis generated from the official AZ-104blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”

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