AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for Azure VMs running a critical application. They need a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. The solution should be cost-effective and allow testing without affecting production. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Backup (which is for long-term data retention with higher RPO/RTO) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for rapid failover and replication), often overlooking the specific RPO/RTO thresholds stated in the question.
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 (ASR) is the correct choice because it provides orchestrated replication and failover for Azure VMs, supporting RPOs as low as 15 minutes (with continuous replication) and RTOs under 1 hour. It also enables non-disruptive test failovers in isolated networks, meeting the requirement for testing without affecting production. ASR is cost-effective for critical workloads as it only charges for replication storage and compute during failover, unlike always-on redundancy solutions.
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 Migrate
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a centralized hub for discovering, assessing, and migrating on-premises workloads and VMs to Azure, with capabilities like dependency analysis and right-sizing recommendations. It is fundamentally a one-time migration and modernization service, not a continuous replication tool. Because it does not replicate production data on an ongoing basis or provide automated failover orchestration, it cannot meet the RTO/RPO requirements of a disaster recovery solution.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed to protect data by taking periodic, snapshot-based or agent-based backups and retaining them in a Recovery Services vault. While it can restore VMs or files, the restore process is not automated failover and typically requires manual or scripted intervention, and the RPO is tied to backup schedule frequency, often hours or days. It does not maintain a continuously available standby environment like Azure Site Recovery, so it is unsuitable for low-RPO/RTO disaster recovery scenarios.
- ✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global Layer 7 load balancer and application delivery controller that routes HTTP/HTTPS traffic to healthy backends based on latency and health probes. It can help redirect traffic to a secondary region if both environments are already provisioned and running, but it does not replicate data, maintain standby infrastructure, or orchestrate failover events. Since it lacks the storage-level replication and computing orchestration needed to make a DR site ready, it is not a disaster recovery solution on its own.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery orchestrates continuous, block-level replication of Azure VMs, VMware, Hyper-V, or physical servers to Azure or to a secondary site, with application-consistent snapshots that support RPOs in the single-digit minutes range. It provides automated failover and failback, alongside non-disruptive recovery drills (test failovers) that validate the recovery plan without impacting production workloads. This combination of continuous replication, orchestrated failover, and testability is why Azure Site Recovery meets the DR requirements where the other options do not.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Disaster Recovery Patterns: Active-Active vs Active-Passive
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.
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.
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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.