Azure Site Recovery for Cross-Region Disk Replication
You are designing a disaster recovery strategy for an Azure virtual machine running a critical application. The VM is in the East US region. Your recovery point objective (RPO) is 15 minutes, and your recovery time objective (RTO) is 1 hour. Which Azure service should you use to replicate the VM to the West US region?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Backup (which provides point-in-time restores with longer RPO/RTO) with Azure Site Recovery (which provides continuous replication and rapid failover), overlooking the specific RPO and RTO requirements stated in the question.
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 of Azure VMs between regions. It supports continuous replication with an RPO as low as 30 seconds and can meet your 15-minute RPO, while automated failover and recovery plans can achieve a 1-hour RTO by spinning up replicated VMs in the West US region.
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 orchestrates replication of Azure VMs to a paired secondary region by continuously copying disk writes to a Recovery Services vault, achieving RPOs as low as a few seconds and RTOs in minutes. It supports application-consistent snapshots and includes test failover, scheduled failover, and full orchestration with recovery plans. This continuous, coordinated replication is precisely what makes ASR the correct DR solution.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS layer to route incoming traffic across globally distributed endpoints using methods like performance, priority, or weighted routing. It does not replicate or store any VM data, state, or configuration; it only resolves DNS queries and forwards requests to endpoints that must already be running and accessible. Consequently, after an outage Traffic Manager can only send users to an already-recovered site—it cannot restore or start workloads, so it is not a DR replication mechanism.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup delivers long-term, point-in-time snapshots of VM disks that can be retained for months or years, but these backups are not continuously replicated in an active, failover-ready way. A restore operation is a manual, time-consuming process that yields an RPO and RTO measured in minutes to hours, not the near-synchronous RPO and rapid automated failover needed for site-level DR. Thus, Backup is a safety net for data retention and archival, not an active replication engine for disaster recovery.
- ✗
Azure Migrate
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a discovery, assessment, and one-time migration service that inventories on-premises machines, checks Azure readiness, and performs the initial replication and cutover to move workloads to Azure. Although it uses replication during the actual migration, it is not designed to provide continuous, ongoing replication, periodic failover testing, or recovery orchestration with defined RPO/RTO guarantees. Its focus is a one-way lift-and-shift project, not the operational, process-oriented replication required for disaster recovery.
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
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.
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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.