Q: CASE STUDY: Global Enterprise Network Contoso Ltd is a global manufacturing company with 50,000 employees across 30 countries. They currently operate a mix of on-premises infrastructure (500 servers across 5 data centers) and Azure (20 subscriptions with 100+ VMs and various PaaS services). Their annual IT budget is $10 million, with plans to migrate 70% of workloads to Azure within 2 years. The company needs to reduce IT costs by 30%, improve disaster recovery (current RTO: 24 hours -> target: 2 hours), enhance security posture to meet ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance, and enable remote work for 80% of employees. All solutions must support future growth of 20% annually. Some legacy applications cannot be modified and must run on Windows Server 2012. Network connectivity requires 10 Gbps throughput to Azure with <20ms latency. GDPR compliance mandates that EU customer data must remain in European Azure regions. QUESTION 1 OF 5: Contoso needs to connect their 5 global data centers to Azure and provide any-to-any connectivity (e.g., Data Center 1 can talk to Data Center 2 via the Azure backbone). They also need to connect 20 different Azure VNets across 3 regions. They want a managed service that minimizes routing complexity. Which network topology should you recommend?

Identify the need for global, any-to-any connectivity with minimal routing complexity. Virtual WAN is designed specifically to replace complex traditional hub-spoke setups for global enterprises.

Q: What mistakes do candidates make on this AZ-305 question?

Choosing Traditional Hub and Spoke. While it's a valid architecture, it requires significant manual routing configuration (UDRs, NVAs) for transitive global routing, which the scenario explicitly wants to avoid.

Question 1

CASE STUDY: Global Enterprise Network

Contoso Ltd is a global manufacturing company with 50,000 employees across 30 countries. They currently operate a mix of on-premises infrastructure (500 servers across 5 data centers) and Azure (20 subscriptions with 100+ VMs and various PaaS services). Their annual IT budget is $10 million, with plans to migrate 70% of workloads to Azure within 2 years.

The company needs to reduce IT costs by 30%, improve disaster recovery (current RTO: 24 hours -> target: 2 hours), enhance security posture to meet ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance, and enable remote work for 80% of employees. All solutions must support future growth of 20% annually.

Some legacy applications cannot be modified and must run on Windows Server 2012. Network connectivity requires 10 Gbps throughput to Azure with <20ms latency. GDPR compliance mandates that EU customer data must remain in European Azure regions.

QUESTION 1 OF 5:
Contoso needs to connect their 5 global data centers to Azure and provide any-to-any connectivity (e.g., Data Center 1 can talk to Data Center 2 via the Azure backbone). They also need to connect 20 different Azure VNets across 3 regions. They want a managed service that minimizes routing complexity.

Which network topology should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Identify the need for global, any-to-any connectivity with minimal routing complexity. Virtual WAN is designed specifically to replace complex traditional hub-spoke setups for global enterprises.

Question 2

What mistakes do candidates make on this AZ-305 question?

Accepted Answer

Choosing Traditional Hub and Spoke. While it's a valid architecture, it requires significant manual routing configuration (UDRs, NVAs) for transitive global routing, which the scenario explicitly wants to avoid.

How to approach this question

Full Answer

Common mistakes

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