AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Question
You need to design a disaster recovery strategy for an Azure SQL Database that supports a critical financial application. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 seconds and recovery time objective (RTO) is 30 seconds. Which option should you choose?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse geo-restore (which uses backups and has a much higher RPO/RTO) with active geo-replication, or they assume manual failover can meet strict RTOs, but only auto-failover groups provide the sub-minute RTO and near-zero RPO required for critical applications.
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
✓
Configure active geo-replication with auto-failover groups.
Active geo-replication with auto-failover groups is the correct choice because it provides continuous data replication to a secondary region with an RPO of 5 seconds (asynchronous replication) and an RTO of 30 seconds when auto-failover is enabled. This meets the stringent requirements for a critical financial application, as failover groups handle both database and server-level failover automatically, ensuring minimal data loss and rapid recovery.
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 failover groups with manual failover.
Why it's wrong here
Failover groups provide asynchronous replication, but if the failover is manual, an operator must detect the outage and trigger the failover, which extends RTO beyond the nominal 30 seconds of automatic failover and introduces human error risk. Manual failover can efficiently meet recovery point objectives, but it does not guarantee a fast recovery time; a fully automated approach is required to meet strict RTO requirements.
- ✗
Use long-term retention (LTR) backups.
Why it's wrong here
Long-term retention (LTR) backups are point-in-time copies of the database retained for compliance or disaster recovery that must recover to a specific historical moment; they are taken at most daily or weekly, so changes made after the latest backup are lost, leading to an RPO of up to 24 hours or more. Relying on LTR also requires provisioning a new database from the backup, which lengthens RTO compared to a continuously replicated secondary, making it unsuited to scenarios that need a short recovery point.
- ✓
Configure active geo-replication with auto-failover groups.
Why this is correct
Configuring active geo-replication with auto-failover groups replicates every committed transaction asynchronously to a readable secondary in a paired region, providing an RPO of 5 seconds and an RTO of 30 seconds without requiring manual intervention. The auto-failover group constantly monitors the primary and automatically changes the secondary to become primary upon outage detection, ensuring end-to-end availability with minimal data loss. This is the correct choice when a demanding recovery SLA is required.
- ✗
Enable geo-restore (geo-redundant backup).
Why it's wrong here
Geo-restore uses geo-redundant automated backups that are asynchronously copied to a paired Azure region, but these backups are only as current as the last successful copy, so the RPO is typically up to one hour, and restoring to a new database can take hours (an RTO of up to 12 hours). Because the process is backup-driven rather than replication-driven, it cannot serve workloads that require near-zero data loss or sub-hour failover times; it is a low-cost fallback for infrequent or regional-scale outages.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Disaster Recovery Patterns: Active-Active vs Active-Passive
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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