A company runs a critical application on Azure Virtual Machines in a single availability set. They want to protect against an entire Azure region failure. They need a recovery time objective (RTO) of 30 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. Which solution should they use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
Distractor review
Azure Backup for VMs with geo-redundant backup storage.
Azure Backup provides backups with RPO of daily/weekly and RTO of hours (restore requires building a VM from backup). It cannot achieve the required RTO of 30 minutes and RPO of 15 minutes.
Best answer
Azure Site Recovery to another region.
Azure Site Recovery replicates VMs continuously to a secondary region. It can achieve RPO as low as 15 seconds (with app-consistent snapshots) and RTO of minutes (30 minutes is typical). It supports planned and unplanned failover.
Distractor review
Deploy VMs in an availability zone within the same region.
Availability zones protect against a single datacenter failure but not a full regional outage. They do not provide cross-region disaster recovery.
Distractor review
Use Azure managed disks with geo-replication (LRS to GRS).
Managed disks with GRS replicate the underlying storage pages to a secondary region, but that does not include VM configuration or application state. You would need to recreate the VM and manually activate the data, which can take hours.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
- Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
- Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.
TExam Day Tips
- Underline the problem statement mentally.
- Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
- Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
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More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A company is designing hub-and-spoke networking. Spoke VNets must use a central Azure Firewall for outbound internet traffic. Which two configurations are required?
Question 2
A company is designing private access to a PaaS database from workloads in a VNet. The database should not be reachable over its public endpoint. What should be recommended?
Question 3
A data platform must support analytical queries over petabytes of files in a data lake, while preserving hierarchical namespaces and fine-grained ACLs. Which storage service should you design around?
Question 4
A database workload has an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 4 hours. Cost is more important than near-zero data loss. Which design is usually more appropriate than synchronous multi-region replication?
Question 5
A hub-and-spoke Azure network must centralize outbound inspection and still allow spokes to resolve private endpoint DNS names. Which two components are commonly required? (Choose 2.)
Question 6
A multinational company uses Microsoft Entra ID and several Azure subscriptions. Security administrators need to review privileged role assignments every month and require justification for continued access. Which design should be recommended?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this AZ-305 question test?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Azure Site Recovery to another region. — Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides orchestrated replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region. It can meet RTO of 30 minutes and RPO of 15 minutes with continuous replication. Azure Backup offers backup, but restore RTO is typically hours (full VM restore). Availability zones protect against datacenter failures within a region, not a full region outage. Geo-replication for managed disks is for storage redundancy, not for VM state with application-consistent recovery points.
What should I do if I get this AZ-305 question wrong?
Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.
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