Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect ExpertDesign business continuity solutionsEasy

A small business needs a cost-effective backup solution for its Azure Virtual Machines. The VMs host non-critical development environments, and a daily backup is sufficient. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) can be up to 24 hours. Which Azure service is most appropriate for this scenario?

  1. AAzure Backup
  2. BAzure Site Recovery
  3. CAzure Disk Snapshots
  4. DAzure Storage Account (manual VHD copy)
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A. Azure Backup

Azure Backup provides cost-effective, centralized backup for Azure VMs, supporting daily backups and meeting a 24-hour RPO, which is suitable for non-critical development environments.

Why the other options are wrong

  • B. Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery solution, designed for continuous replication and rapid failover, which is overkill and more expensive for non-critical daily backups with a 24-hour RPO.
  • C. Azure Disk Snapshots are point-in-time copies of disks. While they can be part of a backup strategy, they don't provide a complete, automated, and policy-driven backup solution for an entire VM with recovery management like Azure Backup.
  • D. Manually copying VHDs to an Azure Storage Account would be labor-intensive, error-prone, and not a scalable or automated backup solution for VMs.

Azure Backup for VMs

Azure Backup provides a managed, scalable, and cost-effective solution for backing up Azure Virtual Machines.

  • Policy-based backups (e.g., daily, weekly).
  • Supports various retention policies.
  • Cost-effective for less stringent RTO/RPO requirements.

Memory trick: Azure Backup, simple and cheap for VMs.

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