Question

A financial services company runs a mission-critical application on Azure SQL Database (single database, Business Critical tier). Compliance auditors require that the company be able to restore the database to any point in time within the last 24 hours to recover from accidental data corruption, and also retain a full weekly backup for 7 years for regulatory purposes. The architect must recommend a data protection approach that meets both requirements while minimizing operational overhead. What should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Rely on the default point-in-time restore (PITR) capability and configure long-term retention (LTR) policies on the database

Answer

Schedule an Azure Automation runbook to export the database to a BACPAC file in Blob storage every week and set a lifecycle policy to keep files for 7 years

Answer

Enable geo-redundant backups and create a failover group to a secondary region for compliance retention

Answer

Deploy Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault and configure a 7-year retention policy against the SQL database