AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure virtual machines in the West US region. They need a disaster recovery solution that replicates VMs to East US with a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 2 hours. They also need to perform non-disruptive disaster recovery drills. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Azure Backup (which is for backup/restore with longer RPOs) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for replication and failover with low RPO/RTO), or they mistakenly think a traffic-routing service like Traffic Manager or Front Door can provide disaster recovery replication without actually moving or copying VM data.
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) orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of Azure VMs between regions. It supports RPOs as low as 15 minutes (continuous replication with crash-consistent or app-consistent snapshots) and RTOs of 2 hours or less, and it enables non-disruptive disaster recovery drills via test failover that isolates replicated VMs in a separate virtual network without impacting production.
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
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a data protection service that takes periodic snapshots of Azure VMs to protect against data loss, corruption, or accidental deletion. However, it does not replicate VM state to a secondary region for continuous availability, nor does it support automated failover or non-disruptive test failover drills. Its RPO is typically 24 hours or defined by the backup policy, which is far too coarse for a disaster recovery requirement like the 15-minute consistency mentioned here.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery directly addresses the DR requirement by continuously replicating Azure VMs to a secondary Azure region, with a recovery point objective (RPO) as low as 15 minutes for supported disk types. It enables orchestrated failover and failback, and crucially allows test failover using isolated networks so you can validate end-to-end recovery without impacting production or incurring downtime. Recovery plans can sequence multi-tier application startup, making it the correct choice for this critical workload.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS layer to distribute incoming traffic across healthy endpoints based on routing methods like priority, weighted, or performance. It cannot replicate virtual machines to another region, because it has no capability to create or manage compute resources—it only sees an endpoint as healthy if the application is already running. Therefore, it can redirect users away from a failed region, but it cannot restore the VMs or meet the stated RPO/test-failover requirements.
- ✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global application delivery controller that provides HTTP/S, layer-7 load balancing, path-based routing, SSL offload, and a web application firewall. While it uses global health probes to reroute client traffic to healthy backend pools, it does not manage the lifecycle of Azure VMs and cannot replicate or fail over the underlying infrastructure. Its failover scope is limited to traffic routing among already-existing endpoints, so it cannot satisfy the need for VM replication and test failover drills.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage 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.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-305 question from scratch — 212 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.