AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Question
A healthcare company is designing a data storage solution for its electronic health records (EHR) system. The system must store patient data in Azure SQL Database with high availability. The solution must meet the following requirements: - Data must be stored in the East US region with automatic failover to a secondary region in West US in case of a regional outage. - The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 5 seconds. - The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) must be less than 1 hour. - The solution must minimize costs while meeting the RPO and RTO. Which Azure SQL Database configuration should the company recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often choose the Business Critical tier (Option C) thinking it provides the best availability, but it only offers intra-region zone redundancy, not cross-region disaster recovery, which is required for a regional outage.
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
✓
Deploy Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication to a secondary server in West US. Configure automatic failover using a failover group.
Active geo-replication with a failover group provides automatic, asynchronous replication to a secondary region (West US) with an RPO of less than 5 seconds and an RTO of less than 1 hour. This configuration meets the high-availability and disaster recovery requirements while minimizing costs compared to higher-tier options.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy Azure SQL Database Managed Instance with failover group to a secondary instance in West US.
Why it's wrong here
Managed Instance's failover groups rely on a geo-replication mechanism that guarantees at most a 5-minute RPO, which is insufficient for a healthcare workload that may need near-zero data loss to meet compliance obligations. Additionally, Managed Instance failover groups require the secondary to be a Managed Instance too, adding administrative overhead and complexity compared to a single Azure SQL Database logical server deployment.
- ✓
Deploy Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication to a secondary server in West US. Configure automatic failover using a failover group.
Why this is correct
Active geo-replication asynchronously replicates changes to a secondary server in West US with a 5-second RPO, and when paired with a failover group, failover is automatic—typically completing in less than an hour—so the workload stays available during a regional outage. This is the standard cross-region DR pattern for Azure SQL Database because it supports readable secondaries and allows the RPO/RTO targets to match the strict uptime and data durability requirements common in healthcare.
- ✗
Deploy Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier with auto-failover group and a secondary replica in a different availability zone within East US.
Why it's wrong here
Placing the secondary replica in a different availability zone—even in Business Critical tier—addresses only zone-level faults, not a wholesale East US region outage. Failover groups require the secondary server to reside in a separate Azure region, so this design lacks true disaster recovery capability across geographical boundaries and would still go down if the entire region is impacted.
- ✗
Deploy Azure SQL Database General Purpose tier with zone-redundant configuration.
Why it's wrong here
Zone-redundant configuration in General Purpose tier replicates data automatically across availability zones but confines the copies to the same region, giving high availability for datacenter incidents while providing no protection against a regional failure. While General Purpose offers active geo-replication, zone-redundancy by itself does not create a secondary in another region and therefore does not satisfy the need for cross-region disaster recovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Compute 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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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