AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company runs a mission-critical application on Azure VMs. You need to design a cross-region disaster recovery solution that meets a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. The solution must minimize costs. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse backup (Azure Backup) with disaster recovery (Azure Site Recovery), assuming geo-redundant backup storage can meet low RPO/RTO targets, when in fact backup is designed for long-term retention and point-in-time restore, not rapid failover.
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 with replication frequency set to 30 seconds.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) can replicate Azure VMs to a secondary region with a replication frequency as low as 30 seconds, enabling an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 15 minutes when combined with a planned failover. This meets the mission-critical requirements while minimizing costs compared to always-on active-active solutions, as ASR only incurs costs 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.
- ✗
Use Azure SQL Database active geo-replication with a failover group.
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication with a failover group is a database-level disaster recovery feature for Azure SQL Database, not for IaaS VM workloads. It replicates only the DB, leaving the VM's OS disks, application binaries, and configuration unprotected. Even if you hosted the app's database on SQL DB, the VM compute itself would still be unreplicated, so the required RPO of 5 minutes and RTO of 15 minutes for the entire application cannot be met.
- ✗
Use Azure Storage with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) and Azure Traffic Manager.
Why it's wrong here
RA-GRS with Traffic Manager provides read access to blobs, files, or queue data in a secondary region with a typically 15-minute RPO, but it does not replicate the VM compute or its OS disk. Traffic Manager can steer requests, but if the VM fails, there is no secondary VM running to accept traffic—so this combination only addresses data access, not workload failover, and fails the RPO/RTO targets for the application.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup with geo-redundant storage.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with geo-redundant storage is designed for long-term retention and point-in-time recovery from data loss, not for continuous disaster recovery of a running workload. The minimum backup frequency for Azure VMs is 15 minutes, which already exceeds the required 5-minute RPO, and restore times are typically measured in hours rather than the required 15-minute RTO. It also lacks the orchestrated failover and DNS-based rerouting needed to restore service quickly.
- ✓
Use Azure Site Recovery with replication frequency set to 30 seconds.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) continuously replicates the VM's disks to a secondary region using a replication frequency configurable down to 30 seconds, which comfortably meets the 5-minute RPO requirement. ASR provides coordinated failover with recovery plans, allowing the VM to be started in the secondary region within the 15-minute RTO target. It is the appropriate DR solution for IaaS VMs, unlike backup, geo-replication, or storage-based options, because it replicates both compute and data asynchronously with low enough lag to satisfy the stated SLA.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Network 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
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
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.