AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A multinational corporation is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application running on Azure VMs. The application must have a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. The primary region is East US, and the secondary region is West US. The solution must minimize costs while meeting the requirements. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse high-availability solutions (availability zones, load balancers) with disaster recovery solutions, or assume Azure Backup's cross-region restore can meet low RPOs, when in fact only Azure Site Recovery provides the sub-hour replication frequency required for a 15-minute RPO.
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
✓
Implement Azure Site Recovery for the VMs
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides orchestrated replication of Azure VMs from a primary to a secondary region with an RPO as low as 15 minutes (Premium SSD) and RTOs that can be met within 1 hour through planned failover. It is the native Azure service designed for disaster recovery of IaaS workloads, offering cost-effective replication without requiring always-on secondary VMs, as it only incurs storage costs for replicated disks until failover.
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 an active-passive configuration with Azure Front Door and Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door and Traffic Manager provide global DNS/HTTP load balancing and health-based traffic steering, but they do not replicate VM disks, memory, or application state. An active-passive configuration only directs user traffic to a pre-provisioned secondary site; unless the VMs themselves are continuously replicated to that site, a failover would present stale or missing data, failing the 15-second RPO and minute-level RTO. Additional replication infrastructure would be required, making this incomplete and insufficient.
- ✓
Implement Azure Site Recovery for the VMs
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the native DR service for IaaS VMs, continuously replicating VM storage to a paired secondary region with an RPO as low as 15 seconds and RTO in minutes. It handles orchestrated failover, failback, and recovery drills, offering a cost-effective, fully managed solution that meets the stringent DR objectives without extra infrastructure. This directly satisfies the requirement for cross-region VM protection.
- ✗
Configure the VMs in an availability zone across East US and West US
Why it's wrong here
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters located within the same Azure region, so you cannot span a single availability zone across East US and West US, which are distinct regions. Deploying VMs across availability zones within one region only provides resilience against local datacenter failures, not against a regional catastrophe. This option confuses high availability within a region with disaster recovery across regions.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup with cross-region restore for the VMs
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for VMs relies on scheduled snapshot-based backups, with the default policy capturing a recovery point once per day, yielding an RPO of up to 24 hours—far looser than the required 15 seconds. While cross-region restore can copy backup data to another region, the restore point's age and the time required to materialize a VM from backup mean the RTO is unlikely to be in minutes. Thus it protects against data loss but not the near-zero RPO/RTO required here.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Identity Solutions
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.
About these practice questions
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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.