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.
A company wants to ensure that its cloud resources are available even if a major disaster occurs in one region. They plan to deploy resources in two different geographic locations. Which cloud computing characteristic does this scenario primarily address?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
D) Disaster recovery
Option D (Disaster recovery) is correct because the scenario explicitly describes deploying resources in two different geographic locations to ensure availability despite a major regional disaster. Disaster recovery (DR) focuses on restoring services and data after a catastrophic failure, often using paired regions (e.g., Azure paired regions) to provide geo-redundancy and failover capabilities. This goes beyond simple uptime guarantees to address full recovery from region-level outages.
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.
✗
A) Scalability
Why it's wrong here
Scalability is about handling increased load, not regional disaster recovery.
✗
B) Elasticity
Why it's wrong here
Elasticity allows dynamic scaling, not specifically for disasters.
✗
C) High availability
Why it's wrong here
High availability typically covers failures within a datacenter or region, not a full regional outage.
✓
D) Disaster recovery
Why this is correct
Disaster recovery prepares for major regional failures by replicating resources to another geographic region.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse high availability (which handles failures within a region, like a datacenter outage) with disaster recovery (which handles region-wide failures), leading them to incorrectly select Option C.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Disaster recovery in Azure often leverages paired regions (e.g., East US paired with West US) to ensure data replication and failover across geographically separated datacenters, typically with a minimum distance of 300 miles. Services like Azure Site Recovery orchestrate replication and failover, while geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates data asynchronously to the paired region, providing an RPO of typically 15 minutes. This design ensures that even if an entire Azure region is lost, resources can be failed over to the paired region, meeting the scenario's requirement.
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
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
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: D) Disaster recovery — Option D (Disaster recovery) is correct because the scenario explicitly describes deploying resources in two different geographic locations to ensure availability despite a major regional disaster. Disaster recovery (DR) focuses on restoring services and data after a catastrophic failure, often using paired regions (e.g., Azure paired regions) to provide geo-redundancy and failover capabilities. This goes beyond simple uptime guarantees to address full recovery from region-level outages.
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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