AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure SQL Database in the West US region. They need a disaster recovery solution with an RPO of 5 seconds and an RTO of 1 hour. They also need to be able to perform patching and maintenance on the primary without downtime. Which configuration should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse zone-redundant configuration (which only protects within a region) with geo-redundant disaster recovery, or they assume manual failover can meet strict RTOs without considering the human delay factor.
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
✓
Active geo-replication with auto-failover group
Active geo-replication with auto-failover group meets the RPO of 5 seconds (typically under 5 seconds for active geo-replication) and RTO of 1 hour (auto-failover groups can fail over in minutes). It also supports patching and maintenance on the primary without downtime by failing over to a secondary replica during planned maintenance, leveraging the continuous data synchronization between primary and secondary databases in different Azure regions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Active geo-replication with auto-failover group
Why this is correct
Active geo-replication with auto-failover group continuously streams transaction log changes from the primary database to a secondary replica in a paired region, providing a recovery point objective (RPO) of up to 5 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of about 1 hour. The auto-failover group adds an orchestration layer that monitors health and triggers failover automatically, and also enables a planned failover that fully synchronizes before switching so no data is lost during maintenance. For a critical application, this combination meets stringent RPO/RTO requirements while keeping downtime minimal.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database backup to geo-redundant storage
Why it's wrong here
Geo-redundant backup storage relies on automatically taken database backups (full, differential, and transaction log) that are copied to a paired region, but geo-restore can only restore the database to a point in time corresponding to the last successfully uploaded log backup, which yields a typical RPO of 1 hour and an RTO of up to 12 hours. It does not maintain a continuously synchronized hot secondary, so during a regional outage you would be restoring a database that could lose up to an hour of committed transactions and face a long rebuild time. Therefore, though backups are essential for point-in-time recovery, they are not an adequate DR solution for a critical application with tight RPO/RTO.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database with zone-redundant configuration
Why it's wrong here
A zone-redundant configuration for Azure SQL Database places the database across multiple availability zones within the same region (for example, the Provisioned tier with zone redundancy), which protects against a single datacenter or availability zone failure but cannot survive a regional outage or disaster. Since the replicas remain inside the same geographic region, any incident that impacts the entire region—such as a large-scale natural event—takes down all replicas together, so this option does not provide geo-disaster recovery. It is a high-availability feature rather than a disaster-recovery feature.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database with failover group using manual failover
Why it's wrong here
An Azure SQL Database failover group with manual failover still requires an operator to initiate the failover action, so the database remains unavailable until someone detects the outage, decides to fail over, and runs the command—this can easily exceed the 1-hour RTO and introduces human error risk. While a failover group uses geo-replication behind the scenes, manual failover mode does not automatically respond to unplanned regional outages, and it will not fail over by itself. For planned maintenance, a manual failover can be acceptable, but for an unplanned disaster the lack of automation makes the RTO unpredictable.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing for Availability Zones and Regions
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.
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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