AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
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?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Backup (which provides long-term retention with geo-redundancy) with Azure Site Recovery (which provides near-synchronous replication and automated failover), leading them to select Option A despite its inability to meet the strict RTO/RPO requirements.
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 to another region.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides orchestrated replication, failover, and failback of Azure VMs to a secondary region, enabling a recovery time objective (RTO) of 30 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes as required. ASR replicates VM disks continuously to the target region, and in a regional failure, you can initiate a planned or unplanned failover to bring up the application within the specified RTO/RPO. This is the only option that offers both cross-region disaster recovery and the granular recovery objectives stated.
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 Backup for VMs with geo-redundant backup storage.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a backup/restore service, not a replication service: it creates scheduled recovery point snapshots (typically daily or weekly, not a continuous 15-minute RPO) and restoring a VM from those snapshots requires rehydrating disks and redeploying the VM, which commonly takes hours and exceeds the 30-minute RTO. Geo-redundant backup storage only protects the backup data itself against regional loss; it does not reduce recovery time or provide automatic failover, so the service-level objectives for this critical application cannot be met.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery to another region.
Why this is correct
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.
- ✗
Deploy VMs in an availability zone within the same region.
Why it's wrong here
Availability Zones consist of physically separate datacenters inside the same Azure region, so they isolate a workload from a single datacenter or rack failure but not from a full regional outage, which can affect all zones simultaneously. If the entire region loses compute, storage, or networking, a VM deployed in an availability zone has no automated cross-region failover path and no replica in a different geography to activate, leaving the application unreachable and failing the required RTO/RPO.
- ✗
Use Azure managed disks with geo-replication (LRS to GRS).
Why it's wrong here
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.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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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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.