AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam

Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery

Recommend a recovery solution for Azure and hybrid workloads that meets recovery objectives

Recovery objectives guide how quickly and how much data an organization can lose. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum age of data that can be recovered, while Recovery Time Objective (RTO) specifies how fast services must be restored. Meeting both objectives ensures that workloads resume with minimal data loss and downtime.

A common service for this is Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR replicates virtual machines and physical servers to a secondary region or on-premises failover site. It supports both Azure and hybrid scenarios, making it easy to protect mixed environments.

Planned and unplanned failovers help you adjust to routine maintenance or emergencies. In a planned failover, you shut down services gracefully before switching, ensuring no data loss. Unplanned failover reacts to outages without shutdown, minimizing downtime at the cost of possible data gaps.

Testing your disaster recovery plan is vital. You can run drills with ASR’s Test Failover feature to verify that applications come back online correctly. Automating network mapping and using Azure Automation runbooks further streamlines recovery steps.

Recommend a backup and recovery solution for compute

Backing up compute resources in Azure often employs Azure Backup. This service protects IaaS virtual machines by taking snapshots of disks at scheduled intervals. Snapshots capture the full state of an OS and data disk, allowing you to restore an entire VM or recover individual files.

You can choose between snapshot-based backups and the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent. Snapshots are ideal for VMs, while the MARS agent works well for specific files or folders on Windows servers. Both options encrypt data at rest and in transit to keep backups secure.

Retention settings let you define daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly archives. These settings help meet regulatory or business requirements for long-term data retention. You can also configure backup policies to automatically prune old backups and control storage costs.

Restoring compute resources can range from a full VM restore to a file-level recovery. Full restores recreate the VM in the same or different region, while file recovery mounts disks to extract specific files. This flexibility ensures quick access to both entire systems and critical documents.

Recommend a backup and recovery solution for databases

Protecting databases involves specialized features beyond standard VM backups. For Azure SQL Database, Azure automatically creates full, differential, and transaction log backups. This offers point-in-time restore within a retention window of up to 35 days.

For SQL Server on Azure VMs, the MARS agent or Azure Backup extension integrates with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to capture consistent backups. You can combine full, differential, and log backups to meet specific RPOs and RTOs. Log backups allow you to restore to precise moments in time.

Azure also supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB managed services. Each uses built-in backup engines with configurable retention and geo-redundancy. You can enable zone-redundant backups to store copies across availability zones for extra resilience.

Long-term retention (LTR) policies let you archive backups for months or years. LTR is essential for compliance and audit requirements that demand extended data preservation. You can restore these archived backups to a new server or instance when needed.

Recommend a backup and recovery solution for unstructured data

Unstructured data, like logs, media files, and documents, is often stored in Azure Blob Storage. To protect this data, you can enable blob snapshots and soft delete. Snapshots capture read-only copies of blobs, while soft delete retains deleted blobs for a set period.

For file shares on Azure Files, Azure Backup provides a managed solution. It takes point-in-time snapshots of file shares without agent installation. You can restore individual files or entire shares to meet business continuity needs.

Versioning and immutable storage help protect against accidental or malicious changes. With blob versioning, each update creates a new version, so you can revert to previous states. Immutable blobs use policies to prevent deletion or modification for a specified retention period, ensuring data cannot be tampered with.

Large-scale or offline backups may use Azure Data Box devices. Data Box moves terabytes of unstructured data to Azure physically, then transfers it to Blob Storage. This method is ideal for initial seeding or when network bandwidth is limited.

Conclusion

In designing backup and disaster recovery solutions for Azure, you must align strategies with Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives. Azure Site Recovery meets hybrid workload needs, while Azure Backup covers compute, databases, and unstructured data. Each solution offers features like snapshots, automated backups, and long-term retention to ensure data durability and service availability. Testing and automation complete the picture, giving organizations confidence that they can recover quickly and safely from any outage.