AZ-305 Azure Site Recovery Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure VMs in a single region. They need to ensure business continuity with an RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 4 hours. The application has dependencies on virtual networks, storage accounts, and other Azure resources. They want to use Azure Backup as the primary disaster recovery tool and must be able to restore the entire application in a secondary region if the primary region fails. Which backup strategy should they recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is that candidates assume Azure Backup can achieve hourly backups for VMs, but the minimum backup frequency for VM backups is every 4 hours. Thus, for a 1-hour RPO, Azure Site Recovery (not Azure Backup) is required.
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 with replication to a secondary region
Azure Site Recovery can replicate Azure VMs to a secondary region with an RPO as low as 15 minutes and an RTO of a few hours, meeting the 1-hour RPO and 4-hour RTO requirements. It also supports recovery plans that include virtual networks, storage accounts, and other dependencies, enabling restore of the entire application. Option C is incorrect because Azure Backup for VMs has a minimum backup frequency of every 4 hours for VM backups, not hourly, so it cannot achieve the required 1-hour RPO.
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 daily backups and cross-region restore
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Daily backups cannot meet the 1-hour RPO requirement. Cross-region restore is available but frequency is insufficient.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery with replication to a secondary region
Why this is correct
Correct. Azure Site Recovery provides continuous replication with low RPO and can orchestrate recovery of entire applications with dependencies.
- ✗
Azure Backup for VMs with hourly backups and cross-region restore
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Azure Backup for VMs cannot achieve hourly backups; the minimum frequency is every 4 hours, so it cannot meet the 1-hour RPO. Cross-region restore does not compensate for insufficient backup frequency.
- ✗
Azure Backup for files with daily backups and geo-redundant storage
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. File-level backups do not support full VM restore and daily backups cannot meet the 1-hour RPO. Geo-redundant storage is a storage option, not a backup strategy for VMs.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Backup Vault Design
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.
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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.