AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
You are designing a disaster recovery plan for a web application hosted on Azure App Service. The application uses Azure SQL Database. The company wants to minimize downtime during a regional outage. Which approach should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse availability zones (which protect against datacenter failures within a region) with multi-region disaster recovery, leading them to choose Option C, which does not address a full regional outage.
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
✓
Deploy App Service in two regions with Azure Front Door for global load balancing and Azure SQL Database active geo-replication.
It combines multi-region App Service deployment with Azure Front Door for global load balancing and Azure SQL Database active geo-replication. This ensures that during a regional outage, traffic is automatically routed to the healthy secondary region, and the database is continuously replicated with a readable secondary, enabling near-zero RPO and minimal RTO 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.
- ✗
Deploy App Service in a single region with Azure Backup for the app and database.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup protects against data loss by creating snapshots and vaulted backups, but it does not provide compute failover or health-based routing. In a regional outage, the App Service plan and SQL database would both be offline, and recovery requires restoring backups to a new region—a manual process that can take hours. This yields an RTO far too high for a DR plan with minimal downtime, and there is no automated traffic redirection.
- ✓
Deploy App Service in two regions with Azure Front Door for global load balancing and Azure SQL Database active geo-replication.
Why this is correct
Deploying App Service in two regions behind Azure Front Door gives you global, anycast-based load balancing with health probes that automatically steer traffic away from a failed region. Meanwhile, Azure SQL Database active geo-replication maintains a continuously copied readable secondary in the paired or selected secondary region, and using a failover group enables automatic, application-transparent failover with a short RTO and low RPO. This combination delivers genuine cross-region disaster recovery: both the compute and data tiers have automated failover paths.
- ✗
Deploy App Service across availability zones in one region and use Azure SQL Database zone-redundant configuration.
Why it's wrong here
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within a single Azure region, so they protect against rack or datacenter failures but do not help if the entire region experiences a service outage or disaster. A zone-redundant SQL database replicates synchronously across zones but cannot fail over to a different geography, meaning the app and database remain inside the affected region. This configuration is classified as high availability, not disaster recovery, and would violate a regional DR requirement.
- ✗
Deploy App Service in two regions with Azure Traffic Manager and use manual database restore.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager performs DNS-based traffic routing, but DNS detection and propagation can take time, and it has no awareness of database state. Pairing it with a manual database restore is problematic because restoring a backup involves recreating the database, applying transaction log backups, and possibly reconfiguring connection strings—typically hours of work. This approach requires significant manual intervention and downtime, whereas the goal is a minimal-downtime, automated DR solution.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Service Bus Topology Design
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
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.
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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.