Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Practice Test (AZ-900)

Cloud service providers that comply with international security standards offer assurance that they are following best practices and legal requirements to protect data. This compliance helps to provide a safer environment for the organization's data and applications, reduces the risk of breaches, and assists in meeting regulatory requirements. It simplifies the legal and regulatory compliance challenges that an organization might face, especially when operating globally. Incorrect answers highlight benefits that are either too specific to general cloud advantages or do not directly relate to the governance aspect brought by adherence to security standards.

Azure Data Box is the correct choice because it is designed for offline bulk data transfer when large amounts of data need to be moved and network conditions are not favorable for online data transfer methods. Azure Migrate is an online migration service that provides guidance across the migration lifecycle but would not be suitable here because of the limited and unreliable internet connectivity. While Azure Migrate might use Azure Data Box as part of a migration strategy, the direct question here is about the tool specifically suited for transferring the data under given network constraints.

The assertion that cloud providers guarantee 100% uptime is incorrect. Cloud providers offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that promise high levels of availability, such as 99.9% or 99.99%, but not 100%. Under the shared responsibility model, the customer is always responsible for protecting their own data and ensuring their applications are resilient. This includes implementing a disaster recovery strategy to handle potential service disruptions, data corruption, or regional outages, for which cloud providers offer tools like Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Arc extends Azure management capabilities to non-Azure environments, like on-premises datacenters and other cloud providers. This enables administrators to manage these resources as if they were native Azure resources, providing a consistent management layer. Azure Arc does not provision resources automatically nor is it primarily a security or network service.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator provides an analysis inclusive of both capital expenses (CapEx) and operational expenses (OpEx), offering a detailed comparison between on-premises infrastructure and Azure over an extended period. It factors in long-term financial implications, making it the appropriate tool for preparing the requested report. In contrast, the Pricing Calculator is more suited for planning immediate operational budgets based on current resource usage without accounting for CapEx or long-term financial planning. Azure Cost Management + Billing and Azure Advisor are tools used for ongoing cloud cost monitoring and optimization recommendations, respectively, and are not designed for initial long-term cost analysis.

Azure Monitor lets you build custom Azure dashboards that display charts or tables based on metrics and log queries. It is not limited to only Azure resources-data can also come from on-premises or other clouds-and it stores data in specialized metrics and logs stores, not exclusively in Azure Storage. Collecting metrics from Azure virtual machines does not require Azure Arc; Azure Arc is used only for non-Azure (hybrid) machines.

An Azure private endpoint provides a network interface with a private IP address from your virtual network. This brings the service directly into your virtual network, ensuring traffic flows over the private Microsoft backbone instead of the public internet. This is its primary security benefit. Other security measures are still necessary as part of a defense-in-depth strategy. For instance, private endpoints do not inherently encrypt data at rest; this is a separate service feature. They also do not automatically apply Network Security Groups (NSGs), although NSGs can be used on the endpoint's subnet for further filtering. Finally, private endpoints operate at the network layer and are not a replacement for identity and access management controls.

Azure Advisor is an intelligent, personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry, then provides recommendations to help improve the efficiency of your Azure resources. Azure Advisor does not directly manage resources, provide real-time security alerts, or guarantee SLAs for your services; its main purpose is to offer guidance that you can act on to optimize your deployments.

When creating a new virtual machine in Azure, you must specify a virtual machine size, which determines the amount of CPU, memory, and temporary storage available to the VM. An Operating System disk is required to boot the virtual machine, and a Network Interface allows the VM to communicate within Azure and to the Internet. Additional data disks can be attached for storage purposes, but they are not a requirement for creating a virtual machine.

ARM templates are JSON files that define the resources you need to deploy for your solution. Using ARM templates, you can deploy, manage, and monitor all the resources for your solution as a group, rather than handling them individually. Templates allow for the deployment of multiple resources in a correct sequence and are reusable for consistent deployment scenarios. Azure CLI scripts, while they can automate deployment, do not define the infrastructure in a template form. Resource groups are a way to organize resources but do not themselves define deployment templates. Similarly, Azure Automation enables the automation of cloud management tasks but does not use JSON templates to define the deployment and management of resources.

Azure Cost Management offers capabilities that enable you to set budgets, monitor spending, and take action to minimize costs, which is essential for budget management in cloud expenditures. While Azure Pricing Calculator helps estimate the potential costs of Azure services before they are deployed, it doesn't offer budget setting or tracking functionality. Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations to optimize deployments but doesn't focus on budget tracking. Resource tags are helpful for organizing resources and associating costs, but they do not provide direct budget management features.

Azure Policy helps to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at scale. With its policy definitions, it enables you to manage and enforce rules across your Azure resources, ensuring that they stay compliant with corporate and regulatory standards. Azure Policy evaluates resources in Azure by comparing the properties of those resources with business rules that are expressed as policies. While other services like Azure Advisor provide recommendations, and resource locks prevent modifications, they do not enforce compliance rules like Azure Policy does. Microsoft Purview relates to data governance across on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments but not directly to policy compliance. Infrastructure as Code is a concept that automates the provisioning of infrastructures through code, which doesn't inherently provide compliance enforcement.

ARM templates support declarative syntax, allowing users to define the 'what' instead of the 'how' in their infrastructure. This ensures consistency and repeatability in deployments, as the same template can be used to set up identical environments multiple times without manual configuration. Answer choices that mention 'procedural syntax' or 'individual deployment' do not align with the nature of ARM templates which are intended for declarative, consistent resource deployment.

This statement is incorrect. Management groups can hold both subscriptions and other management groups, allowing for a flexible and hierarchical structuring within Azure. This hierarchy enables better management of access, policies, and compliance across multiple subscriptions.

Infrastructure as code (IaC) enables developers and operations teams to automatically manage and provision the technology stack for an application through software, rather than using a manual process. IaC uses machine-readable definition files to manage and provision resources, thus eliminating the need for manual intervention. This ensures consistent configurations at scale, improves efficiency, and reduces the potential for human error.