AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Which TWO actions should you take to ensure business continuity for an Azure SQL Managed Instance? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Site Recovery (which works for IaaS VMs) with the native geo-replication and failover group capabilities of Azure SQL Managed Instance, or they mistakenly think that a same-region readable secondary or long-term retention alone satisfies business continuity requirements for a regional disaster.
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
✓
Enable automated backups with a retention period that meets your RPO
Automated backups are a fundamental component of business continuity for Azure SQL Managed Instance. They provide point-in-time restore capabilities within a configurable retention period (7-35 days), directly supporting your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) by allowing you to restore to any point within that window. This ensures that data loss is minimized to the backup frequency, which is typically every 5-10 minutes for transaction log backups.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the instance to another region
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery orchestrates disaster recovery by replicating IaaS virtual machines, not Platform-as-a-Service data services. SQL Managed Instance is a PaaS offering with its own native high availability and geo-failover mechanisms, so ASR cannot capture its transaction logs or state. Attempting to use ASR would miss the instance's internal replica topology and would not provide a consistent, point-in-time recoverable copy.
- ✗
Configure a readable secondary replica in the same region
Why it's wrong here
A readable secondary replica in the same region addresses read-scale scenarios inside the same availability zone, but it does not protect against region-wide outages. For SQL Managed Instance, readable secondaries are not a manually configured DR construct; geo failover is provided instead through a failover group with a secondary instance in another region. Placing the secondary in the same region violates the cross-region requirement for business continuity.
- ✓
Enable automated backups with a retention period that meets your RPO
Why this is correct
Automated backups for SQL Managed Instance enable point-in-time restore (PITR) to any point within the configured retention period, making them the foundational mechanism to meet a specified RPO. Because backups are stored in geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) by default, they also provide a cross-region restore option if the primary region is lost. Choosing a retention period that at least matches your RPO ensures you can recover to a state no older than your recovery target.
- ✓
Configure a failover group with a secondary instance in a different region
Why this is correct
Configuring a failover group with a secondary instance in a different region provides automatic geo-replication and the ability to perform a manual or automatic failover with a single connection string. This directly supports business continuity by maintaining a readable secondary in a paired region, and the RTO is measured in minutes, not hours. Failover groups are the native DR solution for SQL Managed Instance, complementing automated backups for the case of full regional outage.
- ✗
Enable long-term retention (LTR) for backups
Why it's wrong here
Long-term retention (LTR) extends backup retention beyond the automated backup period (up to 10 years) to support regulatory or archival compliance, not failover or recovery-point objectives. While LTR backups can be restored, the restore process is not designed for fast, frequent recovery and does not provide automatic or manual failover. Using LTR in place of a failover group or automated PITR backups would actually increase RTO and cannot protect against the loss of recent transactions.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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
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