AZ-900 Describe cloud concepts Practice Question
What does 'disaster recovery' mean in cloud computing, and how does Azure support it?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume disaster recovery is only about preventing failures (Option A) or that it is automatically handled by the cloud provider (Option D), when in fact DR requires active configuration and planning by the customer.
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
✓
The ability to restore systems and data after a major outage, supported by services like Azure Site Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) in cloud computing refers to the strategies and processes used to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, such as a natural disaster or large-scale outage. Azure supports DR primarily through Azure Site Recovery (ASR), which orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of virtual machines and workloads between Azure regions or from on-premises to Azure, ensuring business continuity with defined recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Disaster recovery means the cloud never experiences any failures
Why it's wrong here
This statement is false because no cloud provider, including Azure, can guarantee zero failures. Even with Azure's high availability SLAs—such as 99.99% for VMs in availability zones—regional outages and service disruptions can still occur due to hardware faults, network issues, or natural disasters. Disaster recovery is designed around the assumption that failures will happen; its purpose is to ensure rapid recovery and data restoration, not to prevent failures entirely.
- ✓
The ability to restore systems and data after a major outage, supported by services like Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Disaster recovery (DR) is the set of processes and tools used to restore systems and data after a major outage, with the goal of meeting defined recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Azure Site Recovery supports this by continuously replicating Azure VMs or on-premises VMs to a secondary region, enabling orchestrated, automated failover and failback during a disaster. Unlike high availability, which minimizes downtime during minor failures, DR specifically addresses large-scale incidents and ensures workloads can be restored in a different location.
- ✗
Disaster recovery is only relevant for on-premises systems
Why it's wrong here
Disaster recovery is not limited to on-premises systems; cloud workloads are equally vulnerable to region-wide outages, service incidents, and accidental resource deletions. In Azure, disaster recovery for cloud-native workloads typically involves replicating VMs or databases to a secondary Azure region using services like Azure Site Recovery or geo-redundant storage. On-premises systems are just one DR scenario—hybrid and entirely cloud-hosted architectures also require explicit DR planning to meet availability and recovery objectives.
- ✗
Azure automatically protects all data with no configuration required
Why it's wrong here
Azure does not automatically configure disaster recovery for all data without customer action. While storage accounts can use geo-redundant storage (GRS) for durability, protecting VMs and applications requires explicitly configuring services like Azure Site Recovery—enabling replication per VM, choosing a target region, and defining recovery plans. Customers must also test failover and set backup policies; without this configuration, a regional outage may still result in data loss or extended downtime.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-900 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-900 exam.