AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company runs a mission-critical application on Azure Virtual Machines that requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 5 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. The application uses a single VM with a managed disk. You need to design a disaster recovery solution that meets these requirements with minimal cost. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Backup (designed for long-term retention with hourly/daily backups) with Azure Site Recovery (designed for replication and rapid failover), and mistakenly think backup frequency can be set to 1 minute, which is technically impossible with Azure Backup's architecture.
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 to replicate the VM to a secondary region with a recovery plan.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides continuous replication with RPO as low as 30 seconds and RTO of minutes when using a recovery plan, meeting the 5-minute RTO and 1-minute RPO requirements. ASR replicates the VM to a secondary region and allows orchestrated failover with minimal cost compared to running a standby VM. This is the only option that satisfies both the RTO and RPO targets for a mission-critical 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.
- ✗
Configure Azure Backup for the VM with a 1-minute backup frequency.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for Azure VMs is a snapshot-based backup service with a minimum recovery point objective of roughly one hour and supports daily/weekly or at-best multi-hour schedules; it does not support a 1-minute backup frequency. Even if it did, snapshots are written to a Recovery Services vault and restore requires creating a new VM from a recovery point, so the RTO would far exceed the 5-minute target. Backup alone also lacks automatic failover and recovery-plan orchestration.
- ✗
Store the managed disk in geo-redundant storage and use Azure Resource Manager templates to redeploy.
Why it's wrong here
Managed disks in Azure do not offer a geo-redundant storage (GRS) redundancy tier—they are limited to locally redundant (LRS) or zone-redundant (ZRS) storage, so the premise is invalid. If you manually copied the disk to a secondary region and then tried to deploy an ARM template for failover, the RTO would include disk copy time, template deployment, and configuration steps, none of which provide the automated, minutes-level failover that Azure Site Recovery offers. This approach has no guaranteed RTO and is not a supported disaster-recovery pattern for managed disks.
- ✓
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VM to a secondary region with a recovery plan.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery replicates Azure VM disks continuously to a secondary region and can achieve an RPO as low as 5 seconds and an RTO of minutes, especially when you use recovery plans to sequence failover and runbook steps. Replica VMs are not continuously powered on, so you pay only for replicated storage and compute during test failovers rather than for a full standby VM. This natively meets the 5-minute RPO/RTO requirement and is the cost-effective DR service purpose-built for this scenario.
- ✗
Deploy a second VM in a secondary region and use continuous replication with Azure Migrate.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a migration toolset, not a continuous disaster-recovery solution; although Server Migration can replicate workloads during a one-time lift-and-shift, it does not provide ongoing DR with periodic failover testing and recovery-plan orchestration. Deploying a second VM in the secondary region and keeping it continuously running would incur full compute, license, and storage costs 24/7, whereas Site Recovery only bills for replicated storage and replication traffic. Furthermore, 'continuous replication with Azure Migrate' does not offer the RPO/RTO guarantees or failover automation that ASR provides.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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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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.