AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on an Azure virtual machine in the West US region. They want to enable disaster recovery to East US with the ability to perform non-disruptive DR drills. They need an RPO of a few minutes. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Backup (which is for long-term retention) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for replication and failover), leading them to choose Backup for DR scenarios that require low RPO and non-disruptive testing.
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 service because it provides continuous replication of Azure VMs from a primary region (West US) to a secondary region (East US) with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of a few minutes. It also supports non-disruptive disaster recovery drills by allowing you to perform test failovers in an isolated network without impacting the production workload.
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 Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the correct disaster recovery solution because it continuously replicates Azure VM disks asynchronously to the paired region, enabling a low recovery point objective (RPO) that can be as low as 30 seconds for supported workloads. It also provides orchestrated failover and test failover capabilities, allowing you to validate recovery plans in an isolated test network without affecting the production environment. Recovery plans can automate the startup order of multi-tier applications, making ASR a true DR orchestration tool rather than just a data protection service.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup uses scheduled point-in-time snapshots combined with retention policies, but it does not perform continuous, block-level replication like Azure Site Recovery. While you can restore a backup to a different region, that restore is a manual, time-consuming process and requires you to recreate or reconfigure the VM, meaning you cannot achieve quick failover or non-disruptive validation. Azure Backup is designed for data retention and recovery from corruption or accidental deletion, not for meeting strict recovery time objectives (RTOs) in a regional disaster.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS level and routes user traffic to healthy endpoints, but it never replicates VM data or state. For Traffic Manager to fail over to a secondary region, that secondary region must already have a running, up-to-date VM environment; it cannot spin up new VMs or synchronize application data after an outage. Thus, it is a traffic-routing mechanism, not a disaster recovery replication or failover service, and it has no concept of test failover or continuous copying of virtual machines.
- ✗
Azure Blueprints
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blueprints is a governance and compliance service that lets you define repeatable Azure environments using ARM templates, policies, and role assignments. It does not involve any runtime replication, monitoring of VM health, or failover behavior; it only helps you deploy and organize resources consistently. Therefore, Blueprints cannot replicate an existing application to another region, nor can it provide any form of automated recovery in the event of a regional outage, making it entirely unrelated to disaster recovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Network 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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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.