AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company runs a critical workload 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 should minimize cost. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Backup (which is for backup/restore) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for disaster recovery/failover), assuming that geo-redundant storage alone can provide VM-level DR, when in fact it only protects storage data, not compute or application state.
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
✓
Implement Azure Site Recovery with replication to a secondary region.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides continuous replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region, enabling failover within minutes. With replication intervals as low as 30 seconds for crash-consistent and 5 minutes for app-consistent snapshots, it comfortably meets the 15-minute RPO, and the orchestrated failover process can achieve the 1-hour RTO. ASR is the native Azure service designed for this exact scenario, minimizing cost by only charging for replication traffic and storage in the secondary region.
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 Backup with geo-redundant storage.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with geo-redundant storage is a backup solution, not a replication solution. Although GRS provides durable off-site copies, the backup schedule is limited to a minimum frequency of 6 to 24 hours (or 1 hour in some configurations), far exceeding the required 15-minute RPO. Additionally, restoring from backup requires manual steps and does not provide automated, orchestrated failover of virtual machines to another region.
- ✗
Deploy an active-passive pair of VMs using SQL Server Always On availability groups.
Why it's wrong here
SQL Server Always On availability groups are designed specifically for database-level high availability and disaster recovery, not for replicating the entire VM workload. This option would only protect SQL Server databases and leaves the OS, application files, networking configuration, and non-SQL components unreplicated. It also requires significant SQL Server licensing overhead and database administration complexity, making it an unsuitable and cost-ineffective choice for a general Azure VM workload.
- ✗
Use Azure Storage with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) and failover the VMs.
Why it's wrong here
RA-GRS only replicates blobs and files in a storage account to a secondary region; it does not replicate compute resources, VM configuration, or managed disk state. You cannot 'failover the VMs' using storage alone because you would need to manually recreate or redeploy the VMs from the geo-replicated disks, which is time-consuming and lacks orchestration. Furthermore, RA-GRS is for storage accounts, not for Azure managed disks used by modern VMs, and it provides no RPO/RTO guarantees for the overall workload.
- ✓
Implement Azure Site Recovery with replication to a secondary region.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is purpose-built for disaster recovery of Azure VMs, replicating the entire VM to a secondary region with an RPO that can be as low as 15 seconds and typically well under the required 15 minutes. It provides crash-consistent and app-consistent snapshot replication, automated failover, failback, and recovery plans, enabling predictable RTO. This makes ASR the correct, cost-effective option that fully satisfies the stated 15-minute RPO requirement.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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
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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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