Question

A financial services company runs a mission-critical application backed by a single Azure SQL Database in the East US region. Regulatory requirements mandate a cross-region disaster recovery capability with an RPO as close to zero as possible and an RTO of under one hour. During a regional outage, the application's connection string must not need to be manually changed, and after failover the primary and secondary roles must be reversible. Which solution should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure an auto-failover group for the Azure SQL Database with a paired secondary in West US and connect the application using the failover group read-write listener endpoint.

Answer

Enable geo-redundant automated backups and, during an outage, perform a geo-restore of the database into West US, then update the application connection string.

Answer

Configure active geo-replication to a readable secondary in West US and have the application manually initiate a forced failover and update its connection string when the primary fails.

Answer

Deploy zone-redundant configuration for the Azure SQL Database within East US to provide resilience against a regional outage.