AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company runs a critical web application on Azure Virtual Machines in a single region. 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 must be cost-effective for a planned failover test. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Backup (snapshot-based, high RPO) with Azure Site Recovery (continuous replication, low RPO), or assume Availability Zones provide regional disaster recovery when they only protect against datacenter failures.
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 Azure Site Recovery (ASR) with replication to a paired secondary region and perform regular test failovers.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates Azure VMs to a paired secondary region with near-synchronous replication, achieving an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 1 hour. It supports cost-effective test failovers by performing non-disruptive drills in an isolated network, validating recovery without impacting production.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure Azure Site Recovery (ASR) with replication to a paired secondary region and perform regular test failovers.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery replicates the entire VM workload continuously at the storage and compute level to the paired region, achieving an RPO of just a few minutes and a practical RTO of 15–30 minutes. Application-consistent snapshots ensure crash-consistent recovery, while periodic test failovers exercise the recovery plan in an isolated network without affecting production or incurring standby costs. This is the only option that provides both replication-based DR and a low enough RPO/RTO for critical web workloads.
- ✗
Create a read-only replica of the VMs in another region using Azure SQL Database geo-replication.
Why it's wrong here
Azure SQL Database geo-replication creates a readable secondary replica of only the database, not the OS disks, application binaries, or accompanying VMs. Even if you promoted that replica during an outage, all other VM-based tiers remain unrecoverable, so the solution fails to protect the workload as a whole. Furthermore, the secondary is a read-only replica and does not provide the same failover semantics as VM replication, making it irrelevant to a region-wide VM recovery requirement.
- ✗
Deploy the VMs across two Azure Availability Zones within the same region.
Why it's wrong here
Availability Zones are separate datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking within a single Azure region, so they mitigate a rack or datacenter failure but not an entire regional outage. If the region itself suffers a disaster, all zones in that region fail together, leaving no redundant copy in a different geographic location. This configuration is high availability, not disaster recovery, and it cannot achieve a cross-region RPO of 15 minutes or less.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup with daily backups to a Recovery Services vault in a paired region.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup vaulting to a paired region operates on a snapshot-and-copy schedule with a minimum RPO of 24 hours for daily backup, so the last 15 minutes of changes would be permanently lost in an outage. Restoring an entire VM from a backup in the paired region is a slow, manual process that can take hours or even days, which is far beyond the required RTO. Azure Backup is a point-in-time restore solution, not a continuous replication-based DR mechanism.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Site Recovery Design
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
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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