How is business continuity achieved for SQL Azure databases in the event of a disaster?

To guard against a catastrophic failure within a data centre region, Azure provides the capability to geo-replicate data to a different data centre region. Active geo-replication is designed as a business continuity solution that allows the application to perform quick disaster recovery of individual databases in case of a regional disaster or large scale outage. When enabled, the application can initiate failover to a secondary database in a different Azure region.

By using auto-failover groups with an automatic failover policy, any outage that impacts database in the group results in automatic failover to the secondary region. In addition, auto-failover groups provide read-write and read-only listener end-points that remain unchanged during failovers. Applications configured to point to the fail-over group endpoint do not need to be re-configured in the event of a fail over. The fail-over endpoint will automatically route traffic from the application to the server in the secondary region.