AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a global e-commerce platform on Azure VMs in a single region. They need to replicate the VMs to a secondary region for disaster recovery. Recovery must be possible within 30 minutes of a failure. The VMs run custom software that must be started in a specific order (database tier before web tier). Which Azure service should they use to meet both the replication and orchestration requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Backup (which is for data protection and long-term retention) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for replication and failover), and overlook the orchestration requirement that only recovery plans can fulfill.
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 with recovery plans
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) with recovery plans is the correct choice because it provides both VM replication to a secondary region and the ability to orchestrate the startup order of VMs. Recovery plans allow you to group VMs into tiers (e.g., database and web) and define dependencies, ensuring the database tier starts before the web tier. ASR meets the 30-minute recovery time objective (RTO) by enabling failover to the secondary region within that timeframe.
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 Site Recovery with recovery plans
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery performs continuous block-level replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region, providing a low RPO; recovery plans group VMs into logical tiers, specify failover order, and can execute pre/post scripts, which lets the whole e-commerce stack fail over predictably within a 30-minute RTO. Recovery plans also allow manual or test failovers, so the response is organized rather than ad hoc.
- ✗
Azure Backup with cross-region restore
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with cross-region restore creates point-in-time backups stored in a geo-redundant vault, not continuous replication, so recovery is a restore operation from a snapshot, incurring an RPO of up to 24 hours and an RTO measured in hours for large workloads. It cannot sequence multiple VMs or application tiers during restoration, and there is no automatic failover mechanism, making it unable to satisfy a 30-minute RTO.
- ✗
Azure Migrate with replication
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate's replication capability is designed for a one-time migration of on-premises VMs into Azure, not for ongoing disaster recovery of VMs already running in Azure. After the migration completes, the tool does not maintain continuous replication to a secondary region, and it lacks the recovery-plan orchestration that would let an e-commerce platform fail over with a defined startup order within 30 minutes.
- ✗
Azure Automation runbooks
Why it's wrong here
Azure Automation runbooks are scripts that automate infrastructure and application tasks, but they have no inherent capability to replicate virtual machines, maintain a secondary standby environment, or act as a data replication engine. A runbook could theoretically call ASR or other APIs to execute failover, but on its own it cannot restore or start VMs in another region, so it is an orchestration complement rather than a DR solution.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Event-Driven Architecture with Event Grid and Service Bus
Key term
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
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
Courseiva writes every AZ-305 question from scratch — 795 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or 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.