Question

A financial services company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a mission-critical Azure SQL Database workload using the Well-Architected Framework Reliability pillar with security considerations. The security team requires that backups be protected against both accidental deletion and malicious insider tampering, while the business requires a recovery point objective (RPO) of no more than 5 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of under 1 hour. The workload must remain available even if an entire Azure region becomes unavailable. Which combination of design choices BEST satisfies both the reliability targets and the security requirement?

Accepted Answer

Enable active geo-replication to a paired region with auto-failover groups, and apply resource locks plus role-based access control that separates backup management from database administration duties.

Answer

Configure only long-term retention (LTR) backups stored in geo-redundant storage and grant the database administrators full control over backup configuration.

Answer

Rely on the default automated point-in-time restore backups within a single region and enforce Azure Policy to require encryption at rest.

Answer

Deploy a secondary read replica in the same region and use a shared administrator account with a privileged access workstation to manage all backup and restore operations.