AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A small business is moving its on-premises file server to Azure. The company has 50 users and stores approximately 500 GB of data, which includes documents and spreadsheets. The users need to access the files from their Windows laptops both at the office and remotely. The company wants to minimize costs while ensuring that files are always available and secure. You need to recommend a storage solution. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates choose Azure Blob Storage (Option A) because it is cheap and familiar, but they overlook the lack of native SMB file sharing support required for Windows laptop users to map drives and collaborate on documents.
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 Files with Azure File Sync and use a Windows File Server on-premises.
Azure Files with Azure File Sync provides a cloud-based file share that users can access via the SMB protocol from Windows laptops both on-premises and remotely, while Azure File Sync enables caching on an on-premises Windows File Server for low-latency access. This solution minimizes costs by using a standard file share tier and leverages Azure Backup for security and availability, meeting the 50-user, 500 GB requirement without over-provisioning.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Migrate the files to Azure Blob Storage and use Azure Storage Explorer for access.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blob Storage is an object-based store that serves HTTP REST APIs, not an SMB/NFS file share, so users cannot map a network drive to it from a Windows file server client. Storage Explorer is only a GUI management tool for uploading/viewing blobs; it does not provide a multi-user file-sharing endpoint with NTFS semantics. Blob Storage also lacks file-level locking, opportunistic locking, or namespace traversal that Windows applications rely on, making it unsuitable as a direct replacement for a file server.
- ✗
Use Azure Stack Edge to sync the data to Azure Blob Storage.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Stack Edge is a physical appliance designed to run edge compute and move large data sets into Azure Blob Storage in offline or low-bandwidth scenarios, not to serve users a file share. It syncs data to Blob Storage, not Azure Files, so there's still no cloud SMB share—end users would still have to change how they access files. It is also far more expensive and operationally complex than needed for a 500 GB file server migration.
- ✗
Deploy Azure NetApp Files with a Standard capacity pool.
Why it's wrong here
Azure NetApp Files is a high-performance enterprise NAS service (SMB/NFS) built for mission-critical workloads like Oracle, SAP HANA, and HPC, and a Standard capacity pool still carries a minimum capacity charge of 4 TiB per pool, so you pay for far more than your 500 GB. Its performance tiering and premium hardware backing make it disproportionately costly and administratively heavier for a small business's simple file share migration. Azure Files with File Sync would provide the same SMB access at a fraction of the cost without setting up volume management, snapshots, and cross-region replication.
- ✓
Deploy Azure Files with Azure File Sync and use a Windows File Server on-premises.
Why this is correct
Azure Files provides fully managed SMB file shares in the cloud, and Azure File Sync replicates those shares to an on-premises Windows File Server, giving users low-latency local access while the cloud retains an authoritative copy. This hybrid setup preserves the existing server's drive-letter mappings, NTFS permissions, and AD integration, effectively 'lifting and shifting' the file server to Azure with minimal client disruption. Cloud tiering can even free local storage by keeping cool files only in Azure, while warm files stay cached on the server—ideal for a small business with modest capacity.
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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.