AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company has an on-premises application running on physical servers with various operating systems. They want to use Azure as a disaster recovery site with an RPO of less than 1 hour and an RTO of less than 4 hours. They need to replicate the servers to Azure and support failover and failback. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Backup (which provides long-term archival backups) with Azure Site Recovery (which provides near-continuous replication and orchestrated failover), failing to recognize that the RPO and RTO requirements demand a replication-based DR solution, not a backup service.
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
✓
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) orchestrates replication, failover, and failback for physical servers and VMs to Azure, meeting the RPO of <1 hour and RTO of <4 hours. It supports heterogeneous operating systems on physical servers and provides continuous replication with recovery points as low as 30 seconds, enabling both planned and unplanned failover with full failback capability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates physical servers to Azure using the Mobility service, which continuously writes data to a cache storage account and then to Azure-managed disks, achieving RPO as low as 30 seconds. It supports both crash-consistent and app-consistent snapshots for Windows and Linux, and enables orchestrated failover via recovery plans. With RTOs in hours, ASR meets the DR requirement for rapid recovery and offers failback to the original on-premises physical server or VMware VM.
- ✗
Azure Backup (MARS agent)
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed for backup, not DR. It can take application-consistent backups but does not support rapid failover with an RTO of less than 4 hours. Failover would require restoring from backup, which takes longer.
- ✗
Azure Migrate
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a discovery, assessment, and migration tool that helps plan and execute lift-and-shift of physical servers to Azure, but it is not designed for ongoing disaster recovery. While Azure Migrate: Server Migration can perform one-time replication to create Azure VMs, it lacks continuous rollback and reprotection capabilities, recovery plans, and predetermined RTO/RPOs that a DR solution must provide. It does not maintain a standing, always-ready replica for failover.
- ✗
Azure File Sync
Why it's wrong here
Azure File Sync is a file-synchronization service that only replicates contents of Windows file servers to Azure file shares in the cloud, preserving file-level changes for cache and backup purposes. It does not capture the server's operating system, installed applications, services, or configuration, so it cannot fail over an entire physical server. Even if an application is stateless, Azure File Sync does not provide the compute-side failover required to bring the workload online in Azure.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage 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
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.
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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.