What is the purpose of Synchronous Replication?

Synchronous replication is designed to achieve real-time data replication, ensuring that any changes made to the primary storage are immediately reflected in the secondary storage. This method of replication provides a highly consistent view of data across locations, meaning that both the source and target systems hold identical data at any given time.

This real-time aspect is particularly crucial for applications that require immediate data availability and consistency, such as financial transactions or critical business operations. In synchronous replication, data is transmitted to the secondary site simultaneously as it is written to the primary site, which means that if a failure occurs at the primary site, the secondary site can take over with no data loss.

Other choices do not align with the fundamental purpose of synchronous replication. For instance, while remote backups and delayed recovery are important for different types of data protection strategies, they do not provide the real-time capabilities that synchronous replication offers. Minimizing hardware costs is also not an objective of this process, as synchronous replication often necessitates additional resources to maintain the real-time data transfer and consistency between sites.