AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure VMs in a single region. They need to ensure the application can failover to another region with minimal data loss and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour. The application uses managed disks and SQL Server Always On availability groups. What is the MOST cost-effective solution that meets the requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse geo-redundant storage (GRS) with VM-level disaster recovery, assuming storage replication alone is sufficient for application failover, but GRS does not handle VM state, network configuration, or orchestrated recovery, making it unsuitable for meeting RTO and 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
✓
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate VMs to a secondary region with a recovery plan
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides orchestrated replication and failover for Azure VMs, supporting both managed disks and SQL Server Always On availability groups. It meets the RTO of 1 hour by enabling a recovery plan that automates the failover sequence, and it minimizes data loss through continuous replication with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) as low as 30 seconds. This is the most cost-effective solution because ASR replicates only changed blocks and does not require a continuously running secondary VM, unlike a full geo-redundant storage or cross-region Always On deployment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure geo-redundant storage (GRS) for the managed disks and restore the VMs in the secondary region
Why it's wrong here
Azure geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates managed disks to a paired secondary region asynchronously, but it only provides storage-level redundancy. Restoring VMs from the replicated disks requires manual steps to create new disks and redeploy the VMs, and the process does not include orchestrated networking, boot order, or scripted recovery steps. This manual recovery cannot guarantee the 1-hour RTO specified by the critical application. Moreover, GRS alone does not provide continuous replication of VM state (like memory or application state) and fails to meet the recovery time objective.
- ✓
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate VMs to a secondary region with a recovery plan
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides continuous replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region with a defined recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes, well within the 1-hour requirement. By creating a recovery plan, you can orchestrate the failover sequence, including start order, scripted actions, and manual actions, ensuring consistent and predictable recovery. ASR is a cost-effective managed service that does not require additional SQL Server licenses or compute resources beyond the replicated disk storage and the replication appliance (which can be scaled or shared). This makes it the recommended solution for meeting the stated RTO and RPO for critical VMs without over-engineering the architecture.
- ✗
Use Azure availability zones to protect against regional failures
Why it's wrong here
Azure availability zones provide high availability within a single Azure region by distributing VMs across fault domains and update domains. They protect against datacenter-level failures, but they do not protect against a regional disaster, such as a complete region outage or a paired-region failure. The requirement explicitly calls for recovery to a secondary region, so availability zones cannot satisfy the cross-region failover objective. Additionally, using availability zones would not provide an RTO of 1 hour for a regional-scale disaster; it only supports resilient placement within the region.
- ✗
Deploy SQL Server Always On availability groups across two regions
Why it's wrong here
SQL Server Always On availability groups can provide cross-region disaster recovery by replicating data to a secondary replica in another region, but this requires deploying additional SQL Server instances and always-on infrastructure, incurring extra licensing and compute costs. The solution also requires you to manage failover of the entire application stack, including all non-SQL VMs, which is outside the scope of the availability group. It does not offer a unified recovery plan for the full application, and the complexity of maintaining a separate replica cluster is not cost-effective for a critical application with a 1-hour RTO unless database-specific availability is a hard requirement. This option introduces unnecessary overhead and does not address the broader VM recovery requirements in a cost-efficient manner.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Disaster Recovery Patterns: Active-Active vs Active-Passive
Key term
Data Replication Strategy
A data replication strategy is a plan for copying and synchronizing data across multiple locations to ensure availability, durability, and performance.
Key term
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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