AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a mission-critical Azure SQL Database. They require a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour. Which replication option should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse 'failover groups' with 'auto-failover groups' (which is not an official Azure term) and may incorrectly choose option C, or they underestimate the RPO/RTO of geo-restore and pick option D, not realizing that geo-restore is a backup-based solution with much higher latency.
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
✓
Failover groups with active geo-replication
Failover groups with active geo-replication provide the lowest RPO (typically 5 seconds or less) and RTO (under 1 hour) for Azure SQL Database. Active geo-replication asynchronously replicates transactions to a secondary region, and failover groups orchestrate a coordinated, application-transparent failover that meets the stringent RTO requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Zone-redundant deployment
Why it's wrong here
Protects within region, not disaster recovery.
- ✓
Failover groups with active geo-replication
Why this is correct
Meets RPO of 5 seconds and RTO of 1 hour.
- ✗
Auto-failover groups with active geo-replication
Why it's wrong here
RTO is typically minutes, but the question specifies 1 hour.
- ✗
Geo-restore
Why it's wrong here
RPO is 1 hour, not 5 seconds.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Identity 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
BIA and RPO RTO Design
Business Impact Analysis and the design of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective define how much data loss and downtime a business can tolerate after an IT failure, guiding the architecture of backup and disaster recovery systems.
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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.