SC-100 Design security solutions for infrastructure Practice Question
You need to design a backup and disaster recovery solution for Azure virtual machines that meets a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 1 hour. Which Azure service should you use?
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
✓
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is the correct choice because it provides continuous replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region with recovery points as often as every 5 minutes, easily meeting the 1-hour RPO, and supports orchestrated failover that can bring workloads online within the 15-minute RTO. Azure Backup (D) is designed for data protection and long-term retention, with typical RPOs of once or twice per day and restore times that generally exceed 15 minutes, so it cannot meet these objectives. Azure managed disk (B) is only a storage abstraction and provides no replication or failover capability, while Azure VM snapshots (C) are point-in-time copies with no automated orchestration or cross-region recovery, so neither satisfies the RTO/RPO requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the correct choice because it provides continuous, block-level replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region. It delivers a recovery point objective (RPO) in the range of minutes, well within the required 1-hour RPO, and offers orchestrated failover and failback with predictable recovery time objectives (RTO). This makes it the only listed option that is purpose-built for disaster recovery, not just backup or local redundancy.
- ✗
Azure managed disk
Why it's wrong here
Azure managed disks are durable, high-availability block storage that reside in a single region. While they offer built-in redundancy like locally redundant storage (LRS) or zone-redundant storage (ZRS), this only protects against hardware failure or datacenter/zone outage within that region—it does not replicate data across regions or provide any point-in-time recovery. Therefore, a managed disk alone cannot satisfy the 1-hour RPO or provide a disaster recovery mechanism.
- ✗
Azure VM snapshot
Why it's wrong here
An Azure VM snapshot captures a manual, point-in-time backup of a managed disk. To meet a 1-hour RPO, you would need to create snapshots every hour, which is operationally complex and incurs incremental storage costs; moreover, snapshots are not automatically orchestrated or integrated with failover to another region. Snapshots also require manual restore processes and do not provide continuous replication, making them unsuitable for automated disaster recovery with a 1-hour RPO.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed for long-term retention and granular restore of files, folders, and system state, but its standard backup schedule for Azure VMs is once per day, yielding an RPO of up to 24 hours. That exceeds the stated 1-hour RPO requirement, and the restore process is manual, so RTO is not guaranteed. Azure Backup is ideal for ransomware or accidental deletion recovery, but it is not a substitute for continuous replication-based disaster recovery.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SC-100 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 SC-100 exam.