Design Business Continuity Solutions
Architects design backup, high availability, and disaster recovery to meet recovery objectives. This domain centers on Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and resilient multi-region design.
Recovery objectives
Design to explicit recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). RTO is the acceptable downtime and RPO is the acceptable data loss; tighter objectives generally cost more. Every continuity design should trace back to these business-defined targets.
Backup design
Azure Backup protects VMs, files, SQL in VMs, and Azure Files using a Recovery Services vault with defined retention. Choose vault redundancy (LRS, ZRS, GRS) and immutability or soft delete to defend against accidental or malicious deletion. Backups meet RPO for data recovery but are not a fast failover mechanism.
Disaster recovery with Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery replicates virtual machines to a secondary region and orchestrates failover and failback, supporting low RTO for regional outages. Recovery plans sequence multi-tier applications during failover. Regular DR drills validate that the plan meets objectives.
High availability by design
Increase availability by distributing across Availability Zones and, for the highest resilience, multiple regions with active/active or active/passive patterns. Zone-redundant services, availability sets, and load balancing remove single points of failure. Choose the pattern that balances the required RTO and RPO against cost.