AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Which THREE of the following are best practices for designing a business continuity solution using Azure Site Recovery? (Select THREE.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse 'automatic failover' with 'automated recovery plans' and select Option A, not realizing that ASR deliberately avoids automatic failover to prevent accidental disruption, and instead relies on manual or scripted triggers.
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
✓
Perform test failovers regularly to validate the recovery plan
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) recommends performing test failovers regularly to validate that the recovery plan works as expected without impacting production workloads. Test failovers use isolated networks to verify replication health, application consistency, and RTO/RPO targets, ensuring the actual failover process is reliable.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure automatic failover for all VMs without manual intervention
Why it's wrong here
Configuring automatic failover for every VM without manual intervention is dangerous because many production workloads require human approval, data consistency checks, or coordinated scripted actions before failover. Azure Site Recovery's recovery plans support manual actions and runbook steps for these exceptions. Full automation for all workloads can also cause unintended data loss if you fail over at a less-recent recovery point, so you need to carefully choose when automation is appropriate.
- ✓
Perform test failovers regularly to validate the recovery plan
Why this is correct
Perform test failovers regularly to validate the recovery plan and ensure your documented RTOs and RPOs remain achievable. Test failovers in Azure Site Recovery spin up replicated copies in an isolated Azure virtual network, so you can verify application startup, networking, and dependencies without impacting production. Regular testing surfaces broken scripts, outdated credentials, or misconfigured DNS that would otherwise only appear during a real disaster.
- ✓
Use recovery plans to orchestrate failover of multi-tier applications
Why this is correct
Use recovery plans to orchestrate failover of multi-tier applications because they encode the correct sequencing of dependent tiers, such as starting the database tier before the application and web tiers. Recovery plans support grouping VMs, adding manual actions or Automation runbooks between groups, and performing failover and failback as a single coordinated operation. This reduces RTO and prevents partial failover states where some tiers are up but unable to connect to others.
- ✗
Use a single target region for all VMs to simplify management
Why it's wrong here
Using a single target region for all VMs can violate data residency, latency, and compliance requirements because applications residing in different geographic locations share a target region located far away. Azure Site Recovery allows you to select target regions based on paired regions, but not every app is suited to the same target. Capacity limits, network connectivity, and cost also vary by region, so a single choice across all workloads is not a best practice.
- ✓
Enable replication for all VMs that are critical to the application
Why this is correct
Enable replication for all VMs that are critical to the application because any unprotected critical VM becomes a single point of failure in a disaster. The goal is to protect every component that must be available to meet your recovery objectives; non-critical VMs can be excluded to reduce cost and replication overhead. This ensures that the minimum required architecture is fully recoverable, and recovery plans can then depend on those replicated VMs being present.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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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.
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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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.