AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
Your company plans to migrate on-premises file servers to Azure. The solution must support SMB protocol and integrate with Microsoft Entra ID for authentication. You need to choose a service that provides fully managed file shares accessible from multiple Azure regions. Which Azure service should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure NetApp Files (which also supports SMB and Entra ID) as the fully managed option, but Azure NetApp Files is a first-party NetApp service requiring more administrative overhead and is not as straightforward for simple multi-region file shares as Azure Files.
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 Files
Azure Files provides fully managed SMB file shares that can be accessed from multiple Azure regions using the SMB 3.0 protocol. It integrates natively with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) for Kerberos-based authentication, allowing on-premises identities to access shares without additional domain controllers. This makes it the correct choice for migrating on-premises file servers to a multi-region, identity-aware managed file service.
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 Disk Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Disk Storage provides block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs, offering persistent, high-performance disks that are attached to a single VM. It does not provide a shared file system accessible over SMB or NFS; to share files across multiple users you would need to build and manage your own file server on the VM. Unlike Azure Files, it lacks built-in Microsoft Entra ID integration for file-level permissions and pre-configured snapshots, making it a poor fit for a fully managed file share migration.
- ✓
Azure Files
Why this is correct
Azure Files is a fully managed file share service that supports both SMB and NFS protocols, enabling users to map shares in Windows or Linux without managing underlying infrastructure. It integrates with Microsoft Entra ID for Kerberos-based authentication and Azure RBAC for share-level permissions, and it offers features like Azure File Sync to extend on-premises file servers. Its simplicity, low operational overhead, and protocol compatibility make it the ideal PaaS choice for migrating typical on-premises file servers to Azure.
- ✗
Azure NetApp Files
Why it's wrong here
Azure NetApp Files is a high-performance, enterprise-grade file storage service built on NetApp ONTAP, offering sub-millisecond latency and advanced capabilities like instant snapshots, cloning, and cross-region replication. While it does support SMB and NFS, it is intended for specialized workloads such as HPC, SAP HANA, or VDI environments, and its cost model requires provisioning capacity pools and careful performance tuning. For a straightforward file server migration, it is overengineered and more complex than Azure Files, which delivers the same core SMB sharing with far less operational overhead.
- ✗
Azure Blob Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blob Storage is an object storage service designed for massive scale, accessing data via REST APIs, SDKs, and data movement tools, rather than through a traditional file-system interface. It does not natively support SMB file sharing or provide file locking and Microsoft Entra ID integration for user-level file permissions; while BlobFuse can simulate a file system, it is not a true SMB mount for interactive user access. Thus, it is not a suitable replacement for file servers where users expect mapped drives and NTFS-style ACLs.
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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.