AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
You are designing a disaster recovery plan for an Azure virtual machine running a critical application. The solution must meet an RPO of 1 hour and an RTO of 4 hours. Which TWO actions should you take? (Choose TWO.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse high availability (Availability Sets) with disaster recovery (cross-region replication), and assuming that backup (Azure Backup) can meet low RPO/RTO requirements when it is designed for long-term retention, not rapid failover.
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 Azure Site Recovery for the VM with replication to a secondary region.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates VMs to a secondary region with configurable recovery point objectives (RPO) as low as 30 seconds, easily meeting the 1-hour RPO. Combined with a Recovery Services vault in the secondary region using geo-redundant storage (GRS), you ensure replicated data is stored durably and can be failed over within the 4-hour RTO, as ASR automates orchestration and failover.
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 the VM in an Availability Set and use premium storage.
Why it's wrong here
An Availability Set protects against intra-region hardware failures by placing VMs in different fault and update domains. It does not replicate any data or VM state to another geographic region, so it cannot provide disaster recovery. Premium storage only improves disk performance and durability within the source region, not cross-region availability.
- ✗
Configure Azure Backup with daily snapshots stored in a Recovery Services vault.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with daily snapshots produces one recovery point per day, meaning the maximum data loss, or RPO, is up to 24 hours. This far exceeds the 1-hour RPO requirement in the scenario. While backups can be restored to another region, the restore operation requires manually creating a new VM and copying data, which is slow and unlikely to meet a strict RTO.
- ✓
Enable Azure Site Recovery for the VM with replication to a secondary region.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the native DR service for Azure VMs. It continuously replicates the VM's disks to the target region using an asynchronous, near-synchronous process that delivers an RPO of a few seconds, and it supports planned and unplanned failover with a predetermined RTO. By orchestrating replication, failover, and failback, ASR is purpose-built to meet a 1-hour RPO/RTO for disaster recovery.
- ✓
Create a Recovery Services vault in the secondary region with geo-redundant storage (GRS).
Why this is correct
Creating a Recovery Services vault in the secondary region is a required prerequisite for enabling Azure Site Recovery, and using geo-redundant storage (GRS) ensures the vault's metadata and any backup data are copied to a paired region for durability. This action alone does not replicate the VM, but when combined with ASR replication, it provides the secure management and storage foundation needed to meet the DR objectives. The vault is the container that holds the replication policy, recovery points, and configuration.
- ✗
Use Azure Front Door to distribute traffic between the primary and secondary regions.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global HTTP/HTTPS load balancer and content delivery network that routes traffic based on the health of backend endpoints. It can redirect user requests to a secondary region during an outage, but it has no capability to replicate virtual machine state, disks, or compute resources. Therefore, Front Door cannot by itself restore a failed VM or meet the RPO/RTO; it is only a traffic-level mechanism that complements a true DR solution.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Identity 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.
About these practice questions
One of 212 original AZ-305 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.