Azure Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Design Flashcards

You are designing a multi-region architecture and need to ensure that DNS automatically fails over to the secondary region when the primary becomes unhealthy. Which Azure service provides this?

Answer: Azure Traffic Manager with health endpoint monitoring

Azure Traffic Manager monitors endpoint health and automatically updates DNS responses to route traffic to healthy endpoints when a primary region fails.

What is the key difference between Azure Site Recovery's 'planned failover' and 'unplanned failover' options?

Answer: Planned failover ensures zero data loss by flushing changes to secondary first; unplanned may have minimal data loss

A planned failover waits for all pending replication changes to sync to the secondary before cutting over, ensuring zero data loss, while unplanned failover immediately promotes the secondary at the risk of losing recent unsynced changes.

An organization needs to test their Azure disaster recovery plan quarterly without interrupting production services and with automatic cleanup of test resources afterward. Which ASR feature supports this?

Answer: ASR Recovery Plans with test failover automation scripts

ASR Recovery Plans allow scripted test failovers with pre/post automation hooks that can spin up and tear down test environments in isolated networks automatically.

Your organization uses Azure Backup for VMs and needs to ensure backup data stored in the Recovery Services vault remains available even if the primary Azure region fails. Which vault replication setting should you choose?

Answer: Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) — primary + secondary region copies

GRS replicates vault data to a paired region, ensuring backup data survives a complete primary region failure and can be used for cross-region restore.

You need to document your DR strategy with defined RTO and RPO targets. Which statement correctly defines these two terms?

Answer: RTO is the time to restore services to operation; RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) defines how quickly systems must be restored; RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines how much data loss is acceptable, measured as time since last backup/replication.

Which Azure SQL Database feature automatically redirects application connections to the secondary replica during a regional failure without requiring connection string changes?

Answer: Auto-failover group listener endpoint

Auto-failover group listener endpoints (read-write and read-only) remain constant; after failover, they automatically point to whichever replica is now the primary.