AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a backup and disaster recovery solution for an on-premises SQL Server database that will be migrated to Azure. The solution must meet the following requirements: 1) Point-in-time restore up to 30 days. 2) Cross-region restore in case of a regional disaster. 3) Long-term retention of backups for 7 years for compliance. Which THREE Azure services or features should the company use? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Backup Server (a legacy on-premises tool) with Azure Backup (a cloud-native service), or assume Azure Blob Storage alone can fulfill backup and DR requirements without the orchestration and retention capabilities of Azure Backup and Site Recovery.
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
✓
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery (B) is correct because it provides cross-region replication and orchestrated failover for SQL Server, enabling disaster recovery with the ability to restore in a secondary Azure region. This directly meets the requirement for cross-region restore in case of a regional disaster.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Backup Server
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup Server (MABS) is an on-premises backup appliance that extends System Center DPM workloads to Azure, making it irrelevant when protecting cloud-native Azure VMs. It provides backup and recovery of files, folders, and workloads to a Recovery Services vault, but it does not perform continuous replication or orchestrated failover to a secondary region. Because the company is designing a cloud-based backup and DR solution, MABS is an extra component that is not required; Azure Site Recovery alone fulfills the DR requirement.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the Azure-native disaster recovery service that replicates Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region using continuous, asynchronous disk replication. It delivers a measurable RPO and RTO by enabling you to failover to replicated copies of the VMs, with options for planned, unplanned, and test failovers, all orchestrated through recovery plans. Because the company needs a disaster recovery solution, ASR is the exact service that meets that need, working alongside Azure Backup for point-in-time restore.
- ✗
Azure Blob Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blob Storage is an object storage service that can be used as a repository for backup data, such as when you configure a custom backup pipeline or use Azure Backup's archive tier, but it is not itself a backup or DR service. It does not provide VM-consistent point-in-time restore, application-aware snapshots, or failover orchestration; it is merely a destination for data. In the standard Azure Backup/ASR architecture, the Recovery Services vault manages the underlying storage, so Blob Storage is not a required element for this scenario.
- ✓
Azure Backup
Why this is correct
Azure Backup provides the data protection layer by taking scheduled snapshots of Azure VMs, offering both crash-consistent and app-consistent (via VSS) recovery points, and storing them in a Recovery Services vault with configurable long-term retention. It supports point-in-time restore to the original VM or an alternate VM, and with cross-region restore you can reinstate a backup to a paired region in a disaster. However, Azure Backup does not continuously replicate VM writes or orchestrate automatic failover, so it is not the answer to the disaster recovery portion of the design; it complements ASR.
- ✓
Azure Recovery Services vault
Why this is correct
A Recovery Services vault is the management and storage container that holds Azure Backup recovery points and Azure Site Recovery replication settings, making it a central part of any BCDR design. It enables features like soft-delete, cross-region restore for backups, and the replication policies that ASR uses, but the vault itself does not perform failover or replication. Therefore, the vault is correctly identified as part of the solution (as a required backing resource), yet the specific DR capability comes from Azure Site Recovery, not from the vault.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Compute Solutions
Key term
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a Microsoft Azure service that keeps your business applications and data running by automatically replicating them to a secondary location and failing over if the primary site goes down.
Key term
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-305 question from scratch — 795 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or 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-305 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-305 exam.