AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a web application on Azure VMs in a single region. They need to ensure that if the region fails, the VMs are replicated to another region and can be started automatically. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Backup (which provides point-in-time restores but not automated regional failover) with Azure Site Recovery (which provides continuous replication and automated VM startup), or they mistakenly think Traffic Manager or Load Balancer can handle VM replication and startup when they only manage traffic routing.
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 Azure VMs from one region to another. It continuously replicates VM disks to the target region and, upon failover, automatically starts the replicated VMs, meeting the requirement for regional disaster recovery with automated startup.
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 choice because it replicates Azure VM disks continuously from the primary region to a configured recovery region, enabling a recovery plan that automates failover and VM startup during a regional outage. It maintains near-synchronous RPO and flexible RTO, and you can test failover with isolated networks to validate readiness. It is a true disaster recovery service designed to bring the entire workload up in another region.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed to create point-in-time snapshots of VM disks and retain them according to a backup policy, but it does not continuously replicate workloads to another region. To recover after a regional outage, an administrator must manually initiate a restore operation from a recovery vault, and the restore can take considerable time because it recreates VMs from snapshots. This thwarts automated failover and startup, so it's not the right DR solution for this scenario.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS level, using the configured routing method to send client connections to one of several public endpoints based on health checks and geographic or performance criteria. However, it does not replicate VM data, create new resources, or remotely start VMs in another region. If the only web application VMs exist in the single region and that region fails, Traffic Manager has no healthy secondary endpoint to return in DNS, so it cannot deliver failover or recovery on its own.
- ✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Azure Load Balancer is a layer-4 load balancer that sits inside a single region and forwards traffic to backend pool VMs within the same virtual network, providing high availability between availability zones or fault domains in that region. It has no cross-region awareness, disk replication, or failover orchestration; every VM it routes to must be in its backend pool, which is bound to a specific region. A complete regional outage takes the load balancer down and leaves no alternative target, so it cannot satisfy the need to run the app in another region.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Disaster Recovery Patterns: Active-Active vs Active-Passive
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
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.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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