Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam

The Azure service that effectively provides geo-redundant storage (GRS) to ensure secure data retention during a disaster is Azure Blob Storage. Azure Blob Storage is designed for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents, images, and backups. With GRS, Azure replicates your data to a secondary region, which is hundreds of miles away from the primary location. This replication ensures that in the event of a regional outage or disaster, your data remains safe and accessible. While Azure Backup does offer data protection and recovery solutions, it primarily focuses on backup and recovery management rather than the direct data storage and geo-redundancy characteristics offered by Blob Storage. Azure Site Recovery is more aligned with disaster recovery scenarios for virtual machines and applications rather than data storage. Azure File Storage provides file shares but does not inherently offer the GRS capability in the same way that Blob Storage does.