AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company runs a critical e-commerce application on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) in a single region. You need to design a disaster recovery (DR) solution that meets a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour for the application tier. The application uses Azure SQL Database (single database). Which combination of Azure services should you recommend to meet the RPO and RTO?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Backup (a backup service with longer RPO/RTO) with Azure Site Recovery (a replication service for DR), or they mistakenly think read-scale replicas or geo-restore can meet aggressive RPO/RTO requirements when they are designed for different purposes.
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
✓
Use Azure Site Recovery for VM replication to a secondary region and Azure SQL Database active geo-replication
Azure Site Recovery provides VM replication to a secondary region with RPO as low as 15 seconds and RTO typically under 1 hour, meeting the 15-minute RPO and 1-hour RTO. Azure SQL Database active geo-replication creates a readable secondary database in another region with an RPO of 5 seconds or less and supports manual failover within minutes, satisfying the stated RPO and RTO. This combination ensures both compute and database tiers can be recovered in the secondary region within the required timeframes.
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 Azure Site Recovery for VMs and Azure SQL Database read-scale replicas
Why it's wrong here
Read-scale replicas in Azure SQL Database are designed to offload read-only workloads such as reporting and analytics, not to provide disaster recovery for the primary write database. A read-scale replica does not support automatic failover, and even manual failover cannot be performed to make it the new primary, so the database remains a single point of failure during a regional outage. Using Azure Site Recovery for VMs alone leaves the SQL tier unprotected, which fails the required RPO/RTO for this critical e-commerce application.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup for VM replication and Azure SQL Database auto-failover groups
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a backup/restore service that creates periodic recovery point snapshots; it is not a continuous replication solution and cannot achieve the 15-minute recovery point objective for VMs because backup frequency is typically limited to daily or less frequent scheduled jobs. The SQL auto-failover group component would handle database failover effectively, but the VM side is not a valid replication mechanism to a secondary region. Consequently, this option does not meet the overall recovery requirements and is incorrect.
- ✗
Use Azure Front Door with regional load balancing and Azure SQL Database geo-restore
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global load balancer and application delivery controller that routes incoming traffic to healthy endpoints; it does not replicate VMs or database data to a secondary region. Azure SQL Database geo-restore recreates a database from geo-redundant backups, which has an RPO of minutes to hours and an RTO that is not guaranteed to meet strict SLAs. This combination is unsuitable for a critical e-commerce workload that requires fast, predictable failover at both the VM and database layers.
- ✓
Use Azure Site Recovery for VM replication to a secondary region and Azure SQL Database active geo-replication
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates Azure VMs to a secondary region, providing crash-consistent and app-consistent recovery points with an RPO typically under 15 minutes, and it supports orchestrated failover to meet the required RTO. Azure SQL Database active geo-replication asynchronously replicates transactions to a fully readable secondary database in another region, offering an RPO of about 5 seconds and manual failover capability with minimal recovery time. Together, these services deliver the low RPO/RTO needed for a critical online transaction processing application, making this the correct solution.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Batch for Large-Scale Compute
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.
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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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.