AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
An Azure SQL Database supports a customer-facing application. The company requires automatic failover to a paired region with minimal administrative action. Which feature should be recommended?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse zone-redundant storage (which protects against zone failures within a region) with cross-region failover, or mistakenly think an elastic pool provides disaster recovery capabilities when it is only a management unit for performance and cost.
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
✓
Auto-failover group
Auto-failover groups in Azure SQL Database enable automatic, synchronous or asynchronous replication of databases to a paired region, with a built-in listener endpoint that handles transparent failover. This meets the requirement for minimal administrative action because failover can be triggered automatically based on the built-in grace period and health monitoring, without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Zone-redundant storage only
Why it's wrong here
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates databases across Azure availability zones within a single region, protecting against datacenter-level failures but not against complete regional outages. It does not provide geo-replication to a secondary region or a listener endpoint that automatically reroutes client connections. Since the customer-facing application requires cross-region failover, this option is insufficient.
- ✓
Auto-failover group
Why this is correct
Auto-failover groups are the correct solution because they implement geo-replication between an Azure SQL Database in a primary region and a readable secondary replica in a different Azure region. Through a logical DNS-based listener endpoint, the service automatically redirects application connections to the secondary during a regional outage, enabling seamless failover with minimal downtime. This directly satisfies the cross-region availability requirement.
- ✗
SQL elastic pool only
Why it's wrong here
A SQL elastic pool is a management and resource-sharing construct that allows multiple Azure SQL databases to share a pooled set of compute and storage resources, but it provides no geo-replication or failover capability. Even if databases are placed in an elastic pool, they remain confined to a single region with no automatic redirection to a standby instance. Thus, it cannot fulfill the need for regional disaster recovery.
- ✗
Azure Backup vault only
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup vault (or the built-in automated backup feature) stores database backups for point-in-time restore and long-term retention, but these backups are not live, queryable replicas. Restoring from a backup requires a manual and often time-consuming process, with data loss up to the last backup point, and does not offer automatic client rerouting. Therefore, backups alone do not provide the continuous geo-replication and automatic failover needed for the application.
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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.