AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical web application on Azure VMs in two availability zones. They need to ensure the application remains available during a regional outage with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 15 minutes. What should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Site Recovery (which handles full VM replication and failover) with Azure Backup (which only handles data backup and restore), or they assume that a traffic manager like Traffic Manager or Front Door alone can provide disaster recovery without the underlying compute replication.
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) is the correct choice because it provides automated replication of Azure VMs from one region to another, enabling failover during a regional outage. With continuous replication, ASR can achieve an RPO of as low as 30 seconds (well within the 5-minute requirement) and, when combined with a well-tested recovery plan, can meet the 15-minute RTO by orchestrating the startup of replicated VMs in the secondary region.
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
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a backup service that takes periodic snapshots of Azure VMs with a default RPO of 12 hours or more for daily scheduled backups. While it can protect against data loss, it does not perform continuous replication and does not maintain a hot, ready-to-start standby VM. For a critical web application requiring near-zero downtime, Azure Backup alone cannot meet the strict RTO/RPO targets. Therefore, this option is incorrect for the stated DR requirement.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that routes incoming requests to healthy endpoints across regions, but it does not replicate the underlying VM data or maintain a synchronized standby environment. It simply directs traffic to a target backend that is already running and up to date. Without a continuously replicated secondary VM, Traffic Manager cannot fail over a failed primary because there is no consistent, ready copy to route to. Hence, it is not the right service for VM replication and recovery.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the correct service for this requirement because it provides continuous replication of Azure VMs from the primary region to a secondary region, with an RPO as low as 5 minutes and a typical RTO of 15 minutes for web workloads. It orchestrates failover and failback, enabling the application to be brought up in the secondary region with minimal data loss and downtime. Site Recovery also supports test failover to validate a DR plan without impacting production. Therefore, it meets the critical web application's replication and recovery requirements.
- ✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global HTTP(S) load balancer and application accelerator that routes client traffic to the closest or healthiest backend, but it does not replicate the work performed by VMs or manage the state of application data. While it can quickly redirect users to a secondary site, it is of no use unless that secondary site already contains the replicated application data and is ready to serve requests. Because it does not create or maintain a copy of the VMs and their managed disks, Front Door is not a replication or recovery service and is incorrect for this need.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Application Architecture
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.
About these practice questions
This AZ-305 question is part of Courseiva's 795-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.