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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While a private endpoint in Azure provides a secure method to connect to services within Azure by keeping traffic on the Microsoft Azure backbone network, it does not in itself secure resources against all forms of network attacks or data exfiltration. Security is a multi-layered approach, and while private endpoints contribute to a security posture, they must be complemented with additional measures such as Network Security Groups (NSGs), firewalls, and monitoring services. It is important to implement a comprehensive security strategy, which includes, but is not limited to, the use of private endpoints.

Azure Monitor is designed to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from various sources within Azure and on-premises environments. By providing powerful analytics tools and customizable dashboards, Azure Monitor helps users gain insights across applications, workloads, and infrastructure. Data sources for Azure Monitor can include Azure resources, on-premises environments, and application telemetry.

This statement is not correct. While cloud services greatly enhance the reliability and availability of applications, they do not provide 100% guaranteed uptime. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provided by cloud vendors typically include commitment to high availability but not absolute perfection. Therefore, organizations still need to have disaster recovery plans in place to prepare for the rare instances when disruptions may occur.

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.

Automated software updates represent a key manageability benefit of cloud services, as they reduce the effort required by IT staff to keep systems up-to-date and secure. Automated scaling, while a benefit of cloud computing, pertains to scalability rather than manageability and would not be the best answer. On-premises data control is not a cloud feature but rather a characteristic of traditional IT environments, making it an incorrect choice. Lastly, reduced hardware costs is more closely related to cost-saving benefits, not specifically manageability.