Design business continuity solutions

A retail company runs a mission-critical stateful application on Azure Database for MariaDB... no — the application runs on a single Azure SQL Database in the General Purpose tier. Business requires that in a full regional outage the database be recoverable in another Azure region within 1 hour (RTO) with no more than 5 minutes of data loss (RPO). The team wants the lowest operational overhead and does not want to manage replication manually. Which solution should you recommend?

A company runs a stateless microservices application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in a single region. Business requirements now mandate that the application remain available even if an entire Azure datacenter (availability zone) fails, with no manual intervention. The solution must minimize administrative overhead and avoid cross-region complexity. Which design should you recommend?

A retail company runs a stateful application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The application stores data on Azure Disk-backed persistent volumes (PVs) via the Azure Disk CSI driver. The architecture team requires a backup and recovery solution that can protect both the Kubernetes cluster resources (deployments, config maps, namespaces) and the persistent volume data, and can restore the entire application to a new AKS cluster in the same region if the original cluster is accidentally deleted. The solution must minimize operational overhead and use a native Azure service. What should you recommend?

A retail company runs a stateful microservices application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in the East US region. The application uses Azure Disk-backed persistent volumes for a self-hosted database and configuration state. Leadership requires a documented disaster recovery plan that can bring the full application—including its persistent data—back online in the West US region within an RTO of 2 hours and an RPO of 30 minutes if East US becomes unavailable. The team wants a repeatable, automated, cloud-native approach that captures both Kubernetes objects and volume data. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A retail company runs a stateless containerized web API on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in the East US region. The business requires the API to survive a full regional outage with an RTO of under 5 minutes and an RPO of zero (the workload holds no persistent state; all data lives in an externally managed Azure Cosmos DB account configured for multi-region writes). The solution must automatically route users away from a failed region without manual intervention and must minimize ongoing cost where possible. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A retail company runs a customer-facing web application on Azure App Service (Premium v3) in the East US region. During a recent regional outage, the application was completely unavailable for several hours. The architect must redesign the solution so that the application remains available if an entire Azure region fails, while distributing user traffic to the closest healthy region for the lowest latency and automatic failover. Which design should the architect recommend?

A financial services company runs a mission-critical SQL Server workload on an Azure VM. Compliance requires that database backups be retained for 7 years and be protected against accidental or malicious deletion, including deletion attempts by rogue administrators. The solution must minimize operational overhead and avoid deploying separate backup infrastructure. Which approach should you recommend?

A company runs a departmental line-of-business application that stores shared documents on an Azure Files (Premium tier) share mounted by several Windows VMs. Compliance requires the ability to recover individual files or the entire share to any point within the last 30 days, with a maximum data loss of 24 hours. The solution must be fully managed and must not require deploying additional backup infrastructure. Which approach should you recommend?

A retail company runs its e-commerce order database on Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server in the East US region. The business requires that the database survive a single datacenter failure within the region with automatic failover, an RPO of zero for committed transactions, and the ability to restore the database to any point within the last 14 days in case of accidental data corruption. Which configuration meets all of these requirements with the least administrative effort?

A company runs a critical three-tier application on Azure VMs in the East US region. The application must survive a full regional outage with an RTO of under 2 hours and an RPO of 15 minutes. During a failover, the web, application, and database tiers must be brought online in a specific order (database first, then application, then web) with configurable time delays between groups. Which solution best meets these requirements?

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?

A retail company runs a globally distributed order-processing application backed by Azure Cosmos DB. The business requires that the application continue accepting new orders (writes) with near-zero downtime even if an entire Azure region becomes unavailable, and they cannot tolerate any manual failover steps that delay write availability. Which Cosmos DB configuration best meets these requirements?

A financial services company runs a critical application on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server in the East US region. Regulatory requirements mandate that the company be able to recover the database in a geographically distant region within 12 hours if the primary region becomes unavailable, and no more than 1 hour of committed transactions may be lost. The team wants to minimize operational complexity and avoid maintaining a hot standby in the secondary region unless strictly necessary. Which configuration should you recommend?

A company runs a physical Windows file server in an on-premises data center that is not virtualized. The compliance team requires that the server's file and folder data be backed up to Azure with a retention of 3 years, without deploying any additional backup infrastructure servers on-premises. The solution must minimize cost and operational overhead. Which approach should you recommend?

A financial services company runs production VMs in the Azure East US region and protects them with Azure Backup using a Recovery Services vault. Compliance requires that if the entire East US region becomes unavailable, backup administrators must be able to restore the VMs into a paired region without waiting for Microsoft to declare a failover. The solution must minimize additional cost while meeting this requirement. What should the architect configure on the Recovery Services vault?

A financial services company runs a session-state store and application cache on Azure Cache for Redis (Premium tier) in the East US region. During a recent datacenter equipment failure within the region, the cache became unavailable for several minutes, forcing users to re-authenticate. The architect must ensure the cache survives the loss of a single datacenter within the region with minimal added latency and no change of region. Which configuration should the architect recommend?

A retail company runs a mission-critical order-processing application on a single Azure SQL Database in the General Purpose service tier. The database is deployed in the East US region. During a recent Azure availability zone outage in that region, the application experienced downtime. The architect must improve resilience against a single availability zone failure while keeping the workload in East US and minimizing cost increases. What should the architect recommend?

A financial services company runs a critical application on Azure SQL Managed Instance. The compliance team requires the ability to restore the database to any point in time within the last 28 days to recover from accidental data corruption caused by application bugs. The architect must ensure this capability is configured with the least administrative overhead and no additional third-party tooling. Which approach should the architect recommend?

A financial services company runs a critical order-management application backed by an Azure SQL Managed Instance in the East US region. Compliance requires a documented disaster recovery capability that can bring the database online in a second Azure region within a 1-hour RTO and no more than 5 seconds of data loss (RPO) during a regional outage. The solution must allow the application connection string to remain unchanged after failover and should require minimal manual intervention. Which approach should you recommend?

A retail company runs a critical order-processing application on Azure SQL Managed Instance in the East US region using the General Purpose service tier. Leadership requires a documented disaster recovery plan that can recover the database in a paired region if the entire East US region becomes unavailable. The business accepts an RPO of up to 1 hour and an RTO of several hours, and wants to avoid the ongoing cost of running a second always-on Managed Instance replica. Which recovery approach should the architect recommend?