What strategy should be recommended to provide geo-redundancy for critical Azure applications?

The recommendation to implement active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is focused on ensuring the high availability and disaster recovery of critical applications across different geographic locations. Active geo-replication allows you to maintain readable secondary databases in different Azure regions. This capability enhances the robustness of the application by providing the ability to switch to the secondary database in case the primary instance fails or becomes unavailable. This strategy is crucial for applications that require minimal downtime and continuous data availability, thus supporting business continuity.

In contrast, using a single region with availability zones, while beneficial for high availability within that region, does not provide geo-redundancy. It protects against hardware failures and other issues within that specific region, but it does not safeguard against regional outages.

Deploying all instances in multiple resource groups does not inherently provide redundancy or better recovery options across different geographic locations. Resource groups are a management concept within Azure and do not impact the availability or reliability of the resources themselves.

Using Azure Backup is valuable for protecting data and enabling recovery of resources, but it does not actively maintain a live, synchronized copy of the databases in a different region like geo-replication does. Azure Backup focuses more on recovery options rather than real-time failover capabilities.

By implementing active geo-re