AZ-305 Question 108
Select 2A financial services company needs a backup and disaster recovery strategy to meet strict compliance requirements. They must retain backup data for seven years for auditing purposes, replicate critical workloads to a secondary Azure region for minimal downtime, and be able to perform test failovers without impacting production. Which two solutions should you incorporate to meet these objectives?
- A
Use Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault configured for Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) and long-term retention policies.
- B
Enable Azure Site Recovery to replicate virtual machines to a secondary region and schedule non-disruptive test failovers.
- C
Store backup data in Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) to minimize costs, using manual scripts for offsite archival.
- D
Rely on ephemeral OS disk snapshots as the primary backup solution for long-term retention and compliance.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B
Explanation
Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault and Azure Site Recovery work together to address both long-term retention and disaster recovery needs. Azure Backup provides automated, policy-driven backups with support for extended retention periods, while Azure Site Recovery replicates VMs and enables test failovers to validate DR procedures. According to Microsoft best practices, using GRS and a Recovery Services vault ensures data durability, while scheduling non-disruptive test failovers helps maintain continuous availability and compliance with regulatory standards.
- A. Correct.
Option 1 is correct. Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault supports long-term retention policies (e.g., up to seven years) and uses GRS to replicate data to a paired region, fulfilling compliance requirements for data retention and durability.
- B. Correct.
Option 2 is correct. Azure Site Recovery replicates workloads to a secondary region and allows test failovers that do not affect production, helping achieve minimal downtime and verify DR readiness.
- C. Incorrect.
Option 3 is incorrect because solely using LRS does not provide sufficient redundancy for compliance and disaster recovery needs. Manual offsite archival can be error-prone and does not fulfill the automated, policy-driven approach required for strict compliance.
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4 is incorrect. Ephemeral OS disk snapshots are not intended for long-term retention or compliance-based backup requirements. They are best used for temporary or short-term scenarios, not for seven-year data retention.