Question 160
A GRS storage account's primary region has a prolonged storage endpoint outage. The owner is considering a customer-managed **unplanned** failover to the secondary region. Which operational consequence must the recovery team plan for?
Explanation
Correct Answer
Geo-redundant storage replicates changes asynchronously between regions. During an unplanned failover, writes made after the Last Sync Time might not exist in the secondary copy and can be lost. Azure switches the storage service endpoint DNS mappings so the promoted secondary becomes the primary for subsequent reads and writes, but this is not a guarantee that all prior writes survived. After customer-managed unplanned failover, the account loses geo-redundancy (typically becoming LRS) and must be reconfigured before regional replication resumes. Recovery planning must cover these data, endpoint, and protection-state transitions.
Incorrect Answers
GRS maintains local copies within each region but transfers data from the primary to the secondary asynchronously. An acknowledged write in the source region is not therefore proof that the remote copy has received it. If the primary stops accepting traffic before the latest changes replicate, an unplanned failover can expose a recovery point gap. The relevant evidence is the published Last Sync Time, not the count of storage replicas or the use of a geo-redundant SKU. Treating cross-region replication as synchronous would understate potential data loss.
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS or RA-GZRS) can expose a secondary read endpoint before an outage, subject to application and service support. Read access is not a substitute for promoting the secondary to a writable primary. In the outage scenario, attempting to send writes to the secondary read endpoint before failover cannot provide normal writes. The recovery team must choose the appropriate customer-managed failover procedure, accept relevant data-loss risks, and validate the new primary service endpoints after the operation completes.
The state after customer-managed unplanned failover is not the same as the state before the disaster. Microsoft documents loss of geo-redundancy after the secondary is promoted, requiring reconfiguration for geo-replication to resume. The original primary's copy is not maintained as a ready-to-use synchronized recovery partner during that transition. A statement that GRS stays enabled without intervention is therefore misleading and would leave the recovered workload with less geographic protection than expected. Track the new redundancy mode and verify replication health before any later failback.






Microsoft Azure Administrator (AZ-104) Practice Tests