To meet database retention requirements, what is the recommended solution?

The recommended solution to meet database retention requirements is to configure a long-term retention policy for the database. This approach allows organizations to specify how long they want to retain their backups and manage them efficiently according to compliance, regulatory, or business needs. A long-term retention policy can be tailored to retain daily backups for a limited time and weekly or monthly backups for extended periods, ensuring that the necessary data is available for recovery or auditing purposes.

In contrast, choosing Azure Site Recovery focuses on disaster recovery rather than data retention. While it is an essential service for maintaining availability and failover capability during an outage, it does not specifically address long-term retention requirements for database backups.

Using automatic Azure SQL Database backups provides a level of data protection as it allows point-in-time restores. However, these backups are typically retained for shorter periods, depending on the pricing tier of the database. Therefore, this option might not satisfy specific long-term retention policies that require data to be held for more extended periods.

Configuring geo-replication of the database enhances availability and performance by replicating data across different geographical regions. While this is valuable for disaster recovery and minimizing downtime, it does not directly address the retention of data for regulatory compliance or long-term archiving.

For these reasons,