Azure Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within a single Azure region, each

with independent power, cooling, and networking. This design provides high availability and fault

isolation. By deploying resources like Fortinet virtual appliances across multiple zones,

applications and data are protected from datacenter-level failures within that single region. This

architecture ensures redundancy, allowing services to remain operational even if one zone fails,

directly enhancing protection and ensuring high availability.

B. Improve database performance and reliability: While reliability is improved, Availability Zones

are not primarily designed for performance enhancement; inter-zone latency can sometimes be a

performance trade-off for higher availability.

D. Protect applications and data across multiple Azure regions: This describes the function of

Azure region pairs or geo-redundancy, not Availability Zones, which operate exclusively within a

single Azure region.

1. Microsoft Azure Documentation, "Regions and Availability Zones in Azure": This document

explicitly states, "Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region...

Availability Zones offer high availability to protect your applications and data from datacenter

failures." This supports options A and C by defining zones as intra-region constructs for HA.

URL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/availability-zones-overview

2. Microsoft Azure Documentation, "Build solutions for high availability using Availability Zones":

This guide details how zones provide fault isolation and redundancy. It clarifies, "To protect your

workloads from datacenter-level failures, you can deploy your resources across multiple zones."

This directly supports the mechanism described in option C.

URL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/high-availability/building-solutions-for-hi

gh-availability (See section: "Availability Zones")