A company stores terabytes of archival data that must be retained for 10 years per regulatory requirements. The data is accessed infrequently (once or twice per year) and retrieval latency of up to 5 hours is acceptable. The company wants the lowest storage cost. They also need to ensure data is encrypted at rest and immutability to prevent deletion or modification during the retention period. Which Azure storage solution should they choose?

Azure Blob Storage with Hot tier and lifecycle management to Archive tier with WORM policy

While this can work, storing initially in Hot tier incurs unnecessary cost before lifecycle moves it. The question asks for lowest storage cost, so starting in Archive is cheaper.

Azure Blob Storage with Cool tier and lifecycle management to Archive tier with legal hold

Legal hold applies to individual blobs and does not provide automated time-based retention. Also, Cool tier is more expensive than Archive.

Azure Files with premium tier and soft delete

Azure Files is a file share service, not designed for archival storage. Premium tier is expensive, and soft delete does not provide immutability.

What does this AZ-305 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Azure Blob Storage with Archive tier and immutability policy (time-based retention) — Azure Blob Storage Archive tier offers the lowest storage cost for data that is rarely accessed and has high retrieval latency (up to 5 hours). Immutability policy with time-based retention provides WORM (write once, read many) protection, meeting compliance. Hot or Cool tiers are more expensive. Azure Files is not optimized for archival and lacks the same cost benefits.

What should I do if I get this AZ-305 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.