AZ-104 Implement and Manage Storage Practice Question
You are designing a disaster recovery strategy for Azure Blob Storage. The storage account is configured with geo-redundant storage (GRS). Which three of the following statements about GRS and failover are true? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume GRS provides synchronous replication with zero data loss, but it is asynchronous, and they may also think failover is irreversible, when in fact you can fail back.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
With GRS, data is replicated asynchronously to a paired secondary region.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates data asynchronously to a paired secondary region, ensuring durability even during a regional outage. In such an outage, you can initiate a customer-managed failover to promote the secondary region as the new primary. GRS maintains three copies (LRS) in the primary region and three additional copies in the secondary region, providing six total replicas.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
With GRS, data is replicated asynchronously to a paired secondary region.
Why this is correct
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) asynchronously replicates data from the primary region to a paired secondary region, meaning writes are committed locally and then copied over without waiting for the secondary to acknowledge. This asynchronous process introduces a recovery point objective (RPO), typically 15 minutes, because data written just before a disaster may not yet be replicated. The three synchronous LRS copies in the primary and three additional LRS copies in the secondary are managed by the Azure storage infrastructure, so you do not maintain them directly.
- ✓
In the event of a regional outage, you can initiate a customer-managed failover to the secondary region.
Why this is correct
Azure Blob Storage supports customer-initiated failover for GRS accounts, allowing you to promote the secondary region to become the new primary during a regional outage. This failover is a manual action triggered from the Azure portal, PowerShell, or CLI, and it changes the account's endpoint to point to the secondary region. However, you should only initiate it after confirming the outage is significant and affecting the primary, because once failed over, the original primary becomes the secondary and replication will not resume automatically until you fail back.
- ✗
After a failover, the secondary region becomes the new primary and replication to the original primary is automatically established.
Why it's wrong here
After a customer-managed failover, the secondary region indeed becomes the new primary and the blob storage account's endpoints are updated to reflect that region. However, replication to the original primary is NOT automatically re-established; Azure does not automatically copy data back to the original primary because the original region may still be recovering or unreachable. To restore the original configuration, you must wait for the original primary to be healthy and then perform a manual failback operation to restore replication to that region.
- ✓
GRS provides three copies of your data within the primary region and three additional copies in the secondary region.
Why this is correct
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) inherently provides six copies of your data to ensure high durability and availability across regions. Within the primary region, three synchronous copies are maintained using locally redundant storage (LRS). These three copies are then asynchronously replicated to a secondary, geographically distant region, where an additional three copies are also stored using LRS. This configuration precisely matches the statement and is fundamental to GRS's cross-regional data resilience capabilities.
- ✗
GRS guarantees zero data loss if a failover is triggered.
Why it's wrong here
GRS does not guarantee zero data loss because replication is asynchronous, meaning there is a window where writes acknowledged in the primary have not yet been copied to the secondary. If the primary region experiences a catastrophic failure or the paired region connection is interrupted, any data written during that replication lag is lost. While GRS provides excellent durability with six copies, the RPO is typically around 15 minutes, so it is not a synchronous replication solution like locally redundant storage (LRS) within a single region.
- ✗
Once a failover is completed, you cannot fail back to the original primary region.
Why it's wrong here
Failing back to the original primary region is absolutely possible after a GRS failover, as long as the original primary region is available and healthy again. Once you initiate a failback, the original primary becomes the secondary and replication is re-established from the current primary back to it. Azure even provides a special failback operation that restores the account to its original primary after the secondary region has been operating as primary for a period. The ability to fail back ensures that GRS supports full disaster recovery return-to-normal scenarios, contradicting the claim that failback is impossible.
Quick reference
Azure Blob Storage Tier Comparison
| Tier | Storage Cost | Retrieval Cost | Latency | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | Highest | Lowest | Immediate | Active data, frequent reads |
| Cool | Lower | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / month |
| Cold | Lower still | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / quarter |
| Archive | Lowest | Highest + rehydration delay | Hours | Long-term compliance retention |
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managed Identities for Azure Resources
Key term
Blob
A blob is a large piece of unstructured data, like a photo or video, stored in the cloud with a unique identifier.
Key term
Blob storage
Blob storage is a cloud service for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data, like documents, images, and videos.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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