AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical OLTP application on Azure SQL Database in the West US region. They need to ensure business continuity if a regional outage occurs. The solution must have a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour. They also want to use the secondary region for read-only query offloading. Which Azure SQL Database feature should they enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse geo-restore (backup-based) with active geo-replication (continuous replication), or assume read scale-out can span regions, when in fact it only works within the same Azure region.
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 automatic failover group
Active geo-replication with automatic failover groups is the correct choice because it provides continuous asynchronous data replication to a secondary Azure SQL Database in a paired region, achieving an RPO of 5 seconds and an RTO of under 1 hour. The automatic failover group enables coordinated failover of multiple databases and allows the secondary region to be used for read-only query offloading by connecting with ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly.
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 automatic failover group
Why this is correct
Active geo-replication continuously pushes transactions to a readable secondary in a paired region, achieving a recovery point objective (RPO) of about 5 seconds and an RTO under one hour. When paired with an auto-failover group, outage detection and promotion of the secondary are automated, so the critical OLTP workload can resume without manual intervention and the secondary can also serve read-only queries during normal operation. This combination directly satisfies both the low data-loss and fast-recovery requirements.
- ✗
Geo-restore
Why it's wrong here
Geo-restore relies on geo-redundant backups taken automatically by Azure SQL Database, with the most recent restore point typically lagging by up to one hour (RPO ~1 hour) and a recovery time that often spans several hours depending on database size and region load. It is a single-database restoration action, not an ongoing replication mechanism, and there is no readable secondary or automatic failover. Because the RPO and RTO exceed the stated targets and the process is manual, it cannot protect a critical OLTP application.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery replicates IaaS virtual machines at the hypervisor level, including disks and VM state, but it cannot natively replicate an Azure SQL Database logical server or the underlying PaaS infrastructure. The OLTP workload runs on a platform-as-a-service database, so ASR would effectively require re-architecting the entire tier into VMs running SQL Server, which is not the scenario. It therefore does not provide active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database and is not a compliant DR solution here.
- ✗
Read scale-out with manual regional failover
Why it's wrong here
Read scale-out creates a local read-only replica in the same Azure region to offload reporting workloads, but it has no copy of the data in another region and thus offers zero cross-region disaster recovery. A 'manual regional failover' is not a capability of read scale-out; you would still need to rely on geo-restore or another mechanism, which reintroduces the RPO/RTO problems. For a critical OLTP database, this option leaves the primary region as a single point of failure and fails the stated DR requirements.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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.
About these practice questions
This AZ-305 question is part of Courseiva's 204-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.