AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical Azure SQL Database in the West US region. They need a disaster recovery solution that automatically fails over to a secondary region (East US) with a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour. Additionally, they want to offload read-only workloads to the secondary database during normal operations. Which Azure SQL Database feature should they enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse active geo-replication with failover groups (which supports readable secondaries and automatic failover) with standard active geo-replication (which requires manual failover and does not provide a single endpoint), or they mistakenly think Always On availability groups applies to Azure SQL Database instead of SQL Server on VMs.
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
✓
Active geo-replication with failover groups
Active geo-replication with failover groups is the correct choice because it provides automatic, asynchronous replication of an Azure SQL Database to a secondary region (East US) with an RPO of up to 5 seconds and an RTO of less than 1 hour. Additionally, it supports readable secondary replicas, allowing read-only workloads to be offloaded to the secondary database during normal operations, meeting all stated requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Active geo-replication with failover groups
Why this is correct
Failover groups provide automatic failover to a readable secondary database. Active geo-replication synchronizes data with an RPO of 5 seconds and supports readable secondaries. The failover group ensures automatic failover with an RTO of typically less than 1 hour.
- ✗
Point-in-time restore
Why it's wrong here
Point-in-time restore (PITR) reconstructs a single database to a specific timestamp using automated backups, protecting against logical corruption or accidental data deletion. However, PITR operates only within the same logical server and region; it does not replicate data to another region or provide a readable secondary. In a regional outage, you cannot automatically fail over—you would first need to recover the server or redeploy the restored database, so it fails the DR requirement for a critical database.
- ✗
Long-term backup retention
Why it's wrong here
Long-term backup retention (LTR) stores full database backups for up to 10 years to satisfy compliance or audit requirements, typically retaining weekly, monthly, or yearly backups. These backups are, at best, stored in geo-redundant storage, but they do not represent a continuously updated secondary replica; restoring from LTR means a backup recovery rather than an automated failover. This approach incurs significant data loss (up to the last retained backup) and recovery time measured in hours, so it cannot meet the RPO/RTO expectations of a critical regional DR solution.
- ✗
Always On availability groups (self-managed)
Why it's wrong here
Always On availability groups are a built-in SQL Server engine feature that you can configure on SQL Server on Azure VMs or Azure SQL Managed Instance, but they require Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), manual configuration, and ongoing patching and maintenance. Azure SQL Database (single database or elastic pool) exposes only the service endpoint, not the underlying SQL Server instance, so you cannot deploy or manage an availability group directly on this PaaS offering. Since the question specifically references 'Azure SQL Database,' this option is out of scope; failover groups are the PaaS-native mechanism for geo-failover.
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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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.