This AZ-900 practice question tests your understanding of describe cloud concepts. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
What is disaster recovery in the context of cloud computing?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Restoring systems and data after a catastrophic event with minimal downtime
Disaster recovery (DR) in cloud computing focuses on restoring systems, applications, and data after a catastrophic event (e.g., natural disaster, cyberattack) to meet Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targets. Azure Site Recovery orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of workloads between primary and secondary regions, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss. This is distinct from high availability, which prevents outages, or auto-scaling, which handles demand fluctuations.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Preventing any service outages from occurring
Why it's wrong here
Preventing outages describes high availability; DR is about recovery after a catastrophic failure.
✓
Restoring systems and data after a catastrophic event with minimal downtime
Why this is correct
Disaster recovery restores services and data after major failures, meeting defined RTO and RPO targets.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Automatically scaling resources when demand increases
Why it's wrong here
Automatic scaling describes elasticity, not disaster recovery.
✗
Distributing traffic across multiple servers for performance
Why it's wrong here
Traffic distribution describes load balancing, not disaster recovery.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is confusing disaster recovery with high availability (Option A), as both involve redundancy, but DR specifically addresses recovery after a failure has occurred, not preventing the failure itself.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, Azure Site Recovery uses continuous replication at the block level (for VMs) or asynchronous replication (for SQL Server Always On) to maintain a consistent copy in a paired region. During failover, the service updates DNS records (e.g., via Azure Traffic Manager) to redirect traffic to the recovered site, and RTO/RPO are defined in minutes, not hours, for critical workloads. A real-world scenario: a ransomware attack corrupts primary storage; DR restores from the last clean snapshot in a secondary region, avoiding data loss up to the RPO window.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this AZ-900 question in full detail.
Describe cloud concepts — This question tests Describe cloud concepts — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Restoring systems and data after a catastrophic event with minimal downtime — Disaster recovery (DR) in cloud computing focuses on restoring systems, applications, and data after a catastrophic event (e.g., natural disaster, cyberattack) to meet Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targets. Azure Site Recovery orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of workloads between primary and secondary regions, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss. This is distinct from high availability, which prevents outages, or auto-scaling, which handles demand fluctuations.
What should I do if I get this AZ-900 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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