You are designing a backup and disaster recovery strategy for a large enterprise with multiple critical workloads. What is the best approach to manage RPO and RTO across different workloads with varying requirements?

Correct answer: Implement tiered backup strategy with different policies for different workload tiers based on criticality

Option D is correct because different workloads have vastly different criticality levels, and a tiered backup strategy allows organizations to align RPO and RTO targets with business requirements, applying more aggressive backup frequencies and shorter retention for mission-critical workloads while using cost-effective policies for less critical ones. Option A is incorrect because on-premises tape storage introduces high RTO due to slow restore times, lacks the geographic redundancy needed for disaster recovery, and does not leverage Azure's cloud-native capabilities. Option B is insufficient because applying a single standard policy to all workloads ignores the fact that critical workloads may require near-zero RPO and RTO that a generic policy cannot guarantee, and manual exception handling is error-prone at scale. Option C, using the same backup frequency for all workloads, wastes cost on non-critical systems and under-protects critical ones, making it the least suitable approach for a large enterprise with diverse workload requirements.