Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam

What Azure service provides business continuity for a payroll system with a recovery time objective of 30 minutes?

1. Azure Backup

2. Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager

3. Azure Site Recovery

4. Geo-redundant storage (GRS)

The correct answer is: Azure Site Recovery

The Azure service that best provides business continuity for a payroll system requiring a recovery time objective (RTO) of 30 minutes is Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery is specifically designed to enable disaster recovery capabilities, allowing businesses to replicate their applications and workloads to another Azure region or to on-premises servers. In the context of the specified RTO, Azure Site Recovery can automate the replication of virtual machines and orchestrate the failover process, ensuring that in the event of a primary site failure, the secondary site can take over quickly, usually within the defined RTO. This ensures that critical business processes, such as payroll, remain uninterrupted and can be restored in a timely manner to meet operational needs. On the other hand, while Azure Backup provides backup solutions to protect data against accidental loss and allows for restoration, it does not directly address failover scenarios within a specific time frame, making it less suitable for a stringent RTO requirement. Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager also offers data protection and recovery capabilities but is typically utilized for on-premises scenarios and requires more complex setup and management, which might not effectively meet the 30-minute RTO in a cloud context. Geo-redundant storage (GRS) focuses on data durability and availability