AZ-305 Question 109
Single answerA manufacturing company hosts critical application workloads on Azure VMs in the East US region. They have a recovery time objective (RTO) of 2 hours and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes if East US experiences an outage. They want to control costs but still ensure minimal downtime and data loss in a regional disaster scenario. Which of the following solutions best meets these requirements?
- A
Implement Azure Backup with daily backups to a locally redundant storage (LRS) Recovery Services vault in East US only.
- B
Implement Azure Backup with daily backups to a geo-redundant storage (GRS) Recovery Services vault, ensuring storage is replicated to another region.
- C
Implement Azure Site Recovery to replicate Azure VMs asynchronously to another region, with regular replication and failover testing.
- D
Implement synchronous replication of VM disks to a secondary region using managed disks with zone redundancy.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
In this scenario, Azure Site Recovery is the most suitable service for meeting both a 2-hour RTO and a 15-minute RPO across regions, providing replication, failover, and failback orchestration. Backup-based solutions alone typically cannot guarantee the tight RPO and RTO requirements for critical workloads. For more information, see the official Microsoft documentation on Azure Site Recovery (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-overview).
- A. Incorrect.
Option 1 is incorrect. While Azure Backup provides data protection, daily backups alone do not meet the 15-minute RPO. Also, storing backups only in the same region leaves you vulnerable to a regional outage.
- B. Incorrect.
Option 2 is incorrect. Although geo-redundant backup storage improves data protection by duplicating backups in another region, daily backups are not sufficient to meet the 15-minute RPO for critical workloads. The restore process could also exceed the 2-hour RTO requirement.
- C. Correct.
Option 3 is correct. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates workloads to another region asynchronously and can achieve an RPO as low as a few seconds or minutes, depending on configuration. It also enables quick failover and failback, helping you meet both the 2-hour RTO and 15-minute RPO requirements.
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4 is incorrect. Azure managed disks with zone redundancy replicate within the same region (across availability zones), not between different geographic regions. This does not fully protect against a complete regional outage.