AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a legacy on-premises application that relies on a SQL Server database. They want to use Azure as a disaster recovery site with a recovery point objective of less than 15 minutes. They need to be able to fail back to the on-premises environment after a disaster. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Backup (which is for archival backups) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for replication and failover), leading them to select Azure Backup despite its inability to meet the sub-15-minute RPO or support failback.
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) orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of on-premises SQL Server workloads to Azure, supporting a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 15 minutes through continuous replication. It enables failback to the original on-premises environment after a disaster, which is a critical requirement for this scenario.
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
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the correct DR solution because it continuously replicates on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure using asynchronous replication, typically achieving a recovery point objective (RPO) of 30 seconds or less. It provides orchestrated failover to Azure and failback to on-premises, enabling the legacy application to run on Azure during a disaster while maintaining application consistency through multi-VM consistency groups.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is wrong because it delivers point-in-time backups via the MARS agent or MABS/DPM, storing recovery points in a Recovery Services vault with retention policies. Unlike Site Recovery, it does not continuously replicate or maintain a ready-to-start replica; restoring requires redeploying data to a new VM, so it cannot provide low-RTO failover or automatic failback for the legacy application.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database
Why it's wrong here
Azure SQL Database is wrong because it is a managed PaaS database service for new or migrated cloud SQL workloads, not a disaster recovery tool for on-premises applications. Although it offers geo-replication and failover for its own databases, it has no capability to replicate or fail over on-premises VMs or SQL Server instances, and it does not address the compute or application layer that the legacy app depends on.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is wrong because it operates at the DNS layer to route user traffic to multiple published endpoints based on routing methods like priority or geographic; it does not replicate data or workload state. It can only redirect to endpoints that are already up and running, so it cannot bring the legacy application back online from Azure—it lacks the replication, replication policy, and orchestrated failover that Site Recovery provides.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage 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.