Your storage account replicates to its region's pair. A compliance reviewer asks what pairing actually guarantees about where the second copy sits, and about how Microsoft applies planned platform updates. Which answer is accurate?
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), objective architecture-and-services. Azure architecture and services medium
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The options
Correct The paired region normally sits in the same geography, and Microsoft rolls planned platform updates out to one region of a pair at a time
Correct. Staying inside the geography is what keeps data-residency commitments intact after a failover, and staged maintenance means a bad platform update cannot hit both halves of a recovery plan in the same window.
Not correct The paired region is in the same city, so latency between the two matches latency inside a region
Wrong, and it would defeat the purpose. Pairs are deliberately separated by distance so that one flood, fire or power event is unlikely to reach both — and that distance costs latency, which is why cross-region replication is asynchronous.
Not correct The pair is whichever region you nominate when you create the resource
Wrong. Pairing is fixed by Microsoft for each region; it is not a per-resource setting. What you choose is whether to use a geo-redundant option at all.
Not correct Updates are applied to both regions of a pair simultaneously so their software versions never diverge
Wrong. Simultaneous updates are the exact failure mode pairing exists to avoid. A faulty rollout would then land on your primary and your recovery target at the same moment.
Why
Region pairing buys two distinct things: distance, so a regional disaster is unlikely to reach both halves, and staged platform maintenance, so an update lands in one region while the other keeps running. Pairs sit inside the same geography so residency commitments survive a failover — Brazil South is the well-known exception, since its pair lies in another geography. You do not choose the pair, only whether to use it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Microsoft AZ-900 study guide skill area architecture-and-services.core-architectural-components
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