AZ-204 Develop for Azure storage Practice Question
You are designing a disaster recovery plan for a storage account containing critical data. The storage account is in the West US region. You need to ensure that if West US becomes unavailable, read access to the data is still possible with minimal latency. The data must be replicated asynchronously. Which replication strategy should you choose?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse GRS with RA-GRS, overlooking that GRS does not provide read access to the secondary region until a failover is initiated, which fails the 'read access with minimal latency' requirement.
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
✓
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
RA-GRS (Read-access geo-redundant storage) is the correct choice because it provides asynchronous replication to a secondary region (paired region) and enables read access to the secondary endpoint even if the primary region fails. This meets the requirement for minimal latency read access during a West US outage, as RA-GRS allows reading from the secondary region while data is asynchronously replicated.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)
Why it's wrong here
RA-GZRS provides synchronous replication within a single region and asynchronous replication to a secondary region, but the read-access feature only grants read access to the secondary endpoint if the primary region fails. The stem requires read access with minimal latency *if* West US becomes unavailable, yet RA-GZRS still depends on the secondary region being promoted for writes; the asynchronous replication to the secondary introduces a recovery point objective (RPO) delay that may not meet the minimal-latency read requirement during failover. This option is tempting because it offers geo-redundancy with read access, which would be correct if the scenario demanded write availability after failover rather than purely read access with the lowest possible latency.
- ✗
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
Why it's wrong here
Locally redundant storage (LRS) stores three copies of your data within a single data center in the primary region. While this provides protection against localized hardware failures, such as disk or rack failures, it offers no redundancy or data availability in the event of a regional outage or disaster affecting the entire data center. Therefore, LRS is unsuitable for a disaster recovery plan requiring cross-regional resilience and continuous availability during a regional incident.
- ✓
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
Why this is correct
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) asynchronously replicates your data to a secondary region hundreds of miles away, maintaining three copies in each region. Crucially, RA-GRS provides a separate read-only endpoint to the secondary region, allowing applications to directly read data from the secondary location even if the primary region becomes unavailable. This capability ensures high availability for read operations with minimal latency during a primary region outage, without requiring a manual failover.
- ✗
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Why it's wrong here
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) also replicates your data asynchronously to a secondary region, storing three copies in both the primary and secondary locations, providing excellent data durability. However, unlike RA-GRS, the secondary endpoint in GRS is not directly accessible for reads until a manual failover is initiated by an administrator. This means that while GRS provides robust disaster recovery, it introduces an availability gap for read operations during a primary region outage, as applications cannot access the secondary data immediately without intervention.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This AZ-204 question is part of Courseiva's 881-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-204 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-204 exam.