AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure VMs. They need to ensure that if an entire Azure region fails, the application can be recovered in another region with minimal data loss. They have a recovery point objective (RPO) of 1 hour and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 4 hours. What should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse backup (Azure Backup) with disaster recovery (Azure Site Recovery); backup is for long-term retention with higher RPO/RTO, while Site Recovery is for rapid failover with low RPO/RTO, and candidates often pick Backup because it 'protects data' without considering the strict RPO/RTO 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
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of Azure VMs to a secondary region, meeting the RPO of 1 hour (typically 30 seconds to 15 minutes for Azure-to-Azure replication) and RTO of 4 hours (failover can be completed in minutes to a few hours, depending on VM count and data size). It is the correct service for full disaster recovery with minimal data loss across regions.
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 Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that routes user requests to healthy endpoints, but it does not replicate virtual machines or their underlying disk data. Even when configured for failover, it requires pre-existing VM replicas in another region to point DNS at; without Site Recovery creating and maintaining those replicas, the VMs would be unavailable. For this scenario, Traffic Manager cannot satisfy the replication requirement.
- ✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door operates at the application layer (HTTP/HTTPS) providing global routing, TLS termination, CDN caching, and a web application firewall, but it has no mechanism to copy VM disks or guest OS state to a secondary region. It is designed to route traffic to origin backends, and those backends must already be deployed and running. Because it cannot create or maintain standby replica VMs, it fails as a solution for replicating Azure VMs.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates Azure VM disks to a designated secondary region using crash-consistent and app-consistent snapshots, enabling a recovery point objective (RPO) as low as 15 seconds and rapid failover when the primary site fails. It also replicates networking and compute configuration, and supports planned/unplanned failover plus failback. This directly meets the critical application's need for low RPO and RTO, making it the correct answer.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup provides point-in-time snapshots of VM disks to restore data after accidental deletion or corruption, but it is batch-oriented with periodic recovery points, typically giving a 24-hour or at best 12-hour RPO. It does not maintain a continuously running replica or enable automatic failover to a different region. While essential for data protection, it cannot provide the low recovery time objective expected of disaster-recovery replication like Site Recovery.
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
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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