AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
Your company has a global application deployed across multiple Azure regions. You need to design a disaster recovery solution that meets a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. The solution should use Azure-native services and minimize costs. Which option should you choose?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Site Recovery with Azure Backup, assuming both are suitable for DR, but Azure Backup is optimized for archival and long-term retention with higher RPO/RTO, while ASR is purpose-built for low-RPO/RTO disaster recovery scenarios.
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
✓
Azure Site Recovery with 15-minute replication
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) with 15-minute replication is the correct choice because it provides application-consistent replication for Azure VMs with a configurable RPO as low as 15 minutes and supports failover within the 1-hour RTO. ASR is an Azure-native disaster recovery service that orchestrates replication, failover, and failback across regions, making it the most cost-effective option for meeting the stated RPO and RTO requirements for a multi-region application.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager with priority routing
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager with priority routing only performs DNS-level traffic redirection: it can steer requests from a primary endpoint to a secondary endpoint when its health probe fails, but it does not replicate application data, VMs, or state between regions. Without a replicated secondary copy, failover will simply reach an empty or stale environment, so it fails to meet data-protection and RTO commitments.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery with 15-minute replication
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates your Azure VMs (or Hyper-V/VMware workloads) to a secondary region and can create application-consistent recovery points at a frequency as low as 15 minutes, giving a tightly bounded RPO. It also provides orchestrated failover, failback, and non-disruptive disaster-recovery drills, so the whole multi-tier application can be recovered in the paired region within minutes.
- ✗
Active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is a database-specific data-replication feature that maintains readable secondary replicas of a single SQL database in another region and supports automatic failover. It cannot replicate VMs, app services, container workloads, or other application tiers, so it only addresses the data tier component; a complete DR scheme for a global application needs a solution that treats all components as a unit.
- ✗
Azure Backup with cross-region restore
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with cross-region restore is a backup-based recovery mechanism: it periodically copies recovery points to the paired region, and admins must manually trigger a restore, recreate the VM, and then bring the app online. Because restore of an entire workload typically takes hours rather than minutes and relies on stale periodic snapshots, the resulting RTO and RPO are far higher than the sub-15-minute replication and automatic failover needed for disaster recovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture
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
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
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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.