An organization hosts mission-critical business reports in an Azure Storage account. The organization requires protection against regional disasters by copying data asynchronously to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away. In addition, client applications distributed globally need immediate, continuous read access to the data in the secondary region at all times, without waiting for or initiating an account failover. Which Azure Storage redundancy option should the organization select?

Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS): ### What Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Is **Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)** is an Azure Storage redundancy option that provides cross-region replication while exposing a dedicated secondary endpoint for read access. Like standard **Geo-redundant storage (GRS)**, RA-GRS synchronously writes data three times within a single physical location in the primary region using **Locally-redundant storage (LRS)**, and then asynchronously replicates that data to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away. ### How It Meets the Requirements - **Regional disaster recovery**: RA-GRS provides multi-region durability by replicating data to a distant geographic region, guarding against full regional outages or catastrophic events. - **Continuous read access in secondary region**: RA-GRS provides a dedicated secondary read-only endpoint (e.g., `https://-secondary.blob.core.windows.net`), allowing client applications to read data directly from the secondary replica without needing an administrative or automated failover. ### Key Advantages and Capabilities - **High data durability**: Offers at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) of data durability over a given year. - **Independent read endpoint**: Applications can balance read traffic or serve local users near the secondary region with lower read latencies. - **Disaster resilience**: Protects against regional downtime without losing access to existing data copies. - **Seamless failover capability**: Supports customer-managed account failover if the primary region experiences sustained downtime. ### Why This Is Optimal RA-GRS perfectly addresses both constraints: it delivers geographic replication for business continuity and grants direct read access to secondary region replicas during normal, healthy operations.