AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs multiple on-premises workloads that are critical. They need a disaster recovery solution that can replicate workloads to Azure and enable failover in the event of an on-premises outage. The solution must support non-VMware and non-Hyper-V physical servers. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Backup (data protection) with Azure Site Recovery (disaster recovery with failover), or assume that 'Azure Disaster Recovery' is a valid service name, when in fact the correct service is Azure Site Recovery.
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 service because it provides orchestrated replication and failover for on-premises physical servers (including non-VMware, non-Hyper-V) to Azure. It supports physical-to-Azure (P2A) replication using the Mobility service installed on the source server, enabling automated failover during an outage. This directly meets the requirement for critical workload disaster recovery with failover capability.
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 captures point-in-time recovery points of on-premises data and workloads to a Recovery Services vault, but it is a backup (data protection) service, not a disaster recovery service. Restores are manual and require recreating or re-provisioning the entire workload, with no health monitoring, no orchestrated failover, and no automatic replication of the underlying OS or apps. For a critical on-premises workload that must fail over quickly and automatically to Azure, Azure Backup alone cannot satisfy RTO/RPO because it does not provide continuous replication or compute failover.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the correct DRaaS solution for this scenario. It performs continuous replication of on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and physical servers to Azure storage, and it tracks application state so that a failover can start a replica in Azure. Site Recovery supports orchestrated failover and test failover through recovery plans that sequence application dependencies, and it provides precise RPO/RPO control. This makes it the only option that actively replicates on-premises workloads for automated disaster recovery rather than just protecting data or migrating once.
- ✗
Azure Migrate
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a centralized discovery, assessment, and migration hub used to evaluate and move on-premises workloads to Azure. Although it includes replication for one-time migration cutover, that replication is not continuous and is not designed for ongoing disaster recovery protection. After migration is complete, Azure Migrate does not monitor or automatically fail over the workload; it simply assists with the actual move, so it cannot provide the required DR failover capability for critical workloads.
- ✗
Azure Disaster Recovery
Why it's wrong here
There is no Azure service named "Azure Disaster Recovery" in the Microsoft cloud lineup; the official service for disaster recovery is Azure Site Recovery. Using a non-existent service name indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the Azure portfolio, and any explanation of "Azure Disaster Recovery" would incorrectly imply a separate product. The correct answer must be Azure Site Recovery, which is the actual implementation of DR-as-a-service within Azure.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Backup and Recovery
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.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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