AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question

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 SQL Server on Azure VM

  Why this is correct

  Azure Backup for SQL Server on Azure VM is a fully managed backup service that integrates with the SQL Server IaaS Agent Extension, automating full, differential, and transaction log backups. It supports point-in-time restore with log backups taken every 15 minutes, and offers long-term retention policies for up to 10 years, meeting both operational recovery and compliance requirements. The centralized monitoring, alerting, and cross-subscription management capabilities make it the ideal choice for a critical SQL database.

• ✗

  Azure Site Recovery

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery service that replicates entire Azure VMs to a secondary region for business continuity, not a backup solution. It maintains replication-based recovery points for failover testing and RPO/RTO objectives, but these are not SQL transaction-consistent backups—they cannot restore a database to a specific second or preserve historical versions for long-term archival. Its primary purpose is to recover from a site-wide outage, not to provide granular, point-in-time database restores or retention compliance.

• ✗

  SQL Server managed backup to Azure

  Why it's wrong here

  SQL Server managed backup to Azure is a T-SQL feature that automates backups to Azure Blob storage, but it is not a centrally managed Azure service—you must configure it individually for each database or instance, setting schedules, retention, and storage accounts manually. It does not integrate with Azure Backup vault, Azure Monitor, or Azure Policy, so you lack centralized visibility and uniform policy enforcement across the enterprise. While it does support transactional log backups for point-in-time restore, the per-instance configuration overhead and lack of managed long-term retention management make it less robust than a dedicated, cloud-native backup solution.

• ✗

  Azure Disk Backup

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Disk Backup protects Azure managed disks by taking crash-consistent snapshots at the disk level, not application-consistent SQL database backups. These snapshots do not include transaction log information, so they cannot provide a point-in-time restore to the exact second, and restoring from a snapshot can lead to data loss or corruption of committed transactions. The restore operation replaces the entire disk, which means it cannot recover a single database, and it lacks the ability to schedule log backups or perform granular file-level restores—making it wholly unsuitable for a critical SQL Server workload.

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