AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical database on Azure SQL Database in the West US region. They need to implement disaster recovery to East US with an RPO of 1 minute and RTO of 1 hour. They also want to use the secondary database for read-only workloads during normal operations. The solution must be fully managed. Which Azure SQL Database feature should they enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Active geo-replication (manual failover, no read-scale) with Auto-failover groups (automatic failover, read-scale), leading candidates to pick Option A even though it lacks the read-scale capability and automatic RTO guarantee.
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
✓
Auto-failover group with read-scale
Auto-failover groups with read-scale (Option B) provide a fully managed disaster recovery solution with an RPO of 1 minute and RTO of 1 hour. They allow the secondary database in East US to be used for read-only workloads during normal operations via the read-scale listener endpoint. This meets all requirements: fully managed, low RPO/RTO, and read-only access to the secondary. Option A (Active geo-replication with failover group) does not support automatic failover and does not provide a read-scale endpoint for the secondary, so it does not meet the RTO requirement or the read-only workload requirement.
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 group
Why it's wrong here
While active geo-replication provides readable secondaries, auto-failover group is the managed feature that simplifies failover and supports read-scale.
- ✓
Auto-failover group with read-scale
Why this is correct
Auto-failover groups manage failover for one or more databases, support read-only access to the secondary, and meet the RPO/RTO requirements.
- ✗
Geo-restore
Why it's wrong here
Geo-restore recovers from a backup and has an RPO of 1 hour or more, not 1 minute.
- ✗
Zone-redundant configuration
Why it's wrong here
Zone redundancy protects against datacenter failures within a region, not across regions.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Non-Relational Database 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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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.