AZ-120 Exam Guide: Planning and Administering Azure for SAP Workloads
AZ-120, Planning and Administering Azure for SAP Workloads, validates the ability to plan, migrate, design, operate, and protect SAP environments on Azure. It is intended for architects and engineers who manage SAP landscapes and coordinate with Azure administrators, database administrators, and customers. This guide helps you decide whether your Azure and SAP experience is ready, which skills to study first, how to use Microsoft’s preparation resources, and when to move from reading to hands-on practice and exam scheduling.
What does AZ-120 validate?
AZ-120 tests whether you can make and implement infrastructure decisions for SAP workloads on Azure, not simply recall Azure service definitions. The certification is Microsoft Certified: Azure for SAP Workloads Specialty, classified as Intermediate, with Azure as the product, Solution Architect as the role, and Technical infrastructure as the subject.
The exam title is Planning and Administering Azure for SAP Workloads. Microsoft describes the target candidate as an architect or engineer who designs and manages an SAP landscape on Azure. The work includes applying industry-specific migration and integration standards, sustaining SAP operations, and adjusting resources for resiliency, performance, scale, provisioning, sizing, and monitoring.
The role also involves partnering with cloud administrators, cloud database administrators, and clients. Microsoft specifically includes solutions such as RISE with SAP in that collaboration model. That means preparation should connect technical implementation with design trade-offs: what must be deployed, how it should be operated, and how the design responds to failure, growth, recovery, and security requirements.
Treat the certification page and the AZ-120 study guide as the authority for the version you intend to take. Microsoft says exams are updated periodically and provides two versions of the Skills Measured objectives when the exam version changes. Before creating a final study checklist, compare the effective version shown on the official guide with your planned exam date.
Is this exam suitable for your background?
AZ-120 is a sensible target when you already understand both SAP environments and Azure administration. Microsoft strongly recommends the Azure Administrator Associate certification, and it expects extensive knowledge of SAP HANA, SAP Business Suite, and SAP NetWeaver, together with experience in virtualization, cloud infrastructure, storage, networking, high availability, backup, disaster recovery, and data protection.
Do not interpret the recommended Azure Administrator Associate certification as a substitute for SAP knowledge. The official audience profile describes a combined role. A candidate who knows Azure but cannot reason about SAP application and database dependencies will need a different preparation sequence from an SAP professional who is new to Azure resource management.
Use a skills inventory before buying training or booking the exam. Mark each area as operational experience, guided practice, conceptual familiarity, or unknown. Include Azure compute, storage, networking, identity, monitoring, backup, recovery, automation, and migration. Separately record your experience with HANA, Business Suite, NetWeaver, SAP architecture, database operations, and SAP-specific availability requirements.
A practical recommendation is to delay scheduling if several foundational Azure areas are still unknown. The exam’s scenario decisions become harder when you must learn a general Azure service and an SAP workload pattern at the same time. If your gaps are narrow, schedule a study checkpoint instead: complete targeted labs, review the relevant objective, and reassess your ability to explain the decision without copying a procedure.
Which skills are measured?
The published AZ-120 assessment areas are migration, SAP infrastructure design, high availability and disaster recovery, and ongoing SAP workload maintenance. Build your preparation around those four domains rather than around a random list of Azure services. The study guide’s bullets illustrate how Microsoft assesses each skill, while related topics may also appear.
Migrate SAP workloads to Azure covers the decisions required to move SAP systems into the platform. Prepare to reason about the existing landscape, dependencies, connectivity, migration approach, and the Azure resources needed to support the target state. A useful study output is a migration plan that identifies prerequisites, sequencing, validation, and rollback considerations rather than a service-name list.
Design and implement an infrastructure to support SAP workloads on Azure requires you to connect workload requirements to Azure architecture. Review compute sizing, storage structures, virtual networks, identity, provisioning, monitoring, and the use of the Azure portal, Azure Marketplace, Azure Resource Manager, and Bicep templates. Practice explaining why a design fits a stated performance, scale, or operational constraint.
Design and implement high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) focuses on continuity decisions. Study the difference between keeping a workload available during component or zone failure and restoring service after a larger disruption. Your notes should link architecture, replication or backup choices, recovery objectives, dependencies, testing, and operational ownership.
Maintain SAP workloads on Azure concerns the full operating lifecycle. Include monitoring, scaling, resource adjustment, backup, data protection, security, network traffic, and troubleshooting-oriented decisions. The official course description also includes managing identities, connecting Azure and on-premises sites, backing up and sharing data, and monitoring the solution.
The supplied official material does not provide percentage weights for these domains. Do not assign study time using unsupported percentages. Instead, use the current Skills Measured outline to identify every listed subskill, then increase time for areas where your experience is weakest or where one practical exercise exposes several dependencies.
How should you sequence your preparation?
Start with the blueprint, then close foundational gaps before studying SAP-specific architecture in depth. A reliable sequence is: establish the exam version, assess Azure and SAP knowledge, review core infrastructure, study migration, design HA/DR, practise operations, and finish with integrated scenarios and exam-interface preparation.
First, download or review the current AZ-120 study guide and turn its objectives into a working checklist. Record the source date or version context in your notes because Microsoft updates exams. Do not rely on an old course outline, a forum post, or a collection of remembered topics when the official guide is available.
Next, map each objective to one of three actions: read official documentation, perform a lab, or explain a design. Reading is appropriate for terminology and service boundaries. Labs are better for deployment, configuration, monitoring, backup, connectivity, and automation. Design explanations reveal whether you can select and justify an approach when the question changes the constraints.
Study general Azure administration before attempting complex SAP scenarios if your foundation is weak. The role uses Azure portal, Marketplace, Resource Manager, and Bicep, and the related course includes virtual machines, virtual networks, storage accounts, identity, backup, hybrid connectivity, network traffic, and monitoring. These are not isolated topics; they form the platform on which SAP decisions depend.
Then move through the four measured domains in a lifecycle order. Migration gives you the starting state, infrastructure design establishes the target platform, HA/DR protects service continuity, and maintenance tests whether the design remains usable. Finish by revisiting cross-domain cases: a migration that must preserve availability, a storage change that affects recovery, or a scale decision that changes monitoring and cost controls.
Use a decision log rather than a copied summary. For every important choice, write the requirement, candidate services or patterns, selected approach, rejected alternative, operational consequence, and validation step. This trains the reasoning AZ-120 scenarios require while avoiding any suggestion that memorized or leaked questions can predict the live assessment.
What should you practise in Azure?
Practise complete operational flows, not isolated clicks. The official course describes concepts, scenarios, procedures, and hands-on labs covering SAP migration and operation on Azure. Recreate that style by starting with a requirement, deploying or configuring the relevant resources, validating the result, observing it, and documenting what happens when a dependency or resource changes.
For infrastructure, build a small, controlled environment that lets you inspect virtual machines, storage, virtual networks, identity, access, and monitoring. The objective is not to reproduce a production SAP system. It is to understand how the platform components interact and which configuration choices affect performance, availability, security, and administration.
For automation, express repeatable infrastructure through Azure Resource Manager concepts and Bicep templates. Compare portal deployment with declarative deployment: identify parameters, dependencies, resource naming, sequencing, and the consequences of changing a template. Keep the exercise focused on understanding the deployment model rather than collecting template fragments without knowing what they create.
For hybrid scenarios, document the path between on-premises sites and Azure, the network controls involved, and the monitoring signals that would show a connectivity problem. Include identity and access decisions. Ask which administrator or partner owns each part of the flow and what evidence would confirm that a change worked.
For operations, practise a review cycle: inspect health and performance, identify an abnormal condition, adjust an appropriate resource or setting, and verify the effect. Add backup and recovery validation to the cycle. A backup configuration that has never been restored is an incomplete operational exercise, even if the configuration appears correct.
Use Microsoft Learn modules and tutorials for guided skill building, and use the AZ-120T00-A course syllabus to structure a broader plan. Microsoft lists the related instructor-led course as Planning and Deploying SAP on Azure, and the course description includes scenarios and labs. Treat any lab environment as practice, not as proof that every production design choice is covered.
How do you study migration and infrastructure design?
Study migration as a sequence of engineering decisions: understand the source landscape, define the destination, plan connectivity and dependencies, choose a migration approach, validate the result, and prepare operations. Infrastructure design then turns workload requirements into Azure resources, deployment controls, security boundaries, monitoring, and a supportable lifecycle.
Create a migration worksheet for an SAP landscape. Include application tiers, databases, interfaces, identity, storage, network paths, operational tools, backup requirements, and business validation. For each item, identify whether it moves, changes, remains connected to the source environment, or must be tested before cutover. This is a preparation exercise, not a claim about a single Microsoft-prescribed migration method.
When reviewing Azure services, avoid memorizing product descriptions in isolation. Ask what requirement each service or configuration addresses. For example, connect a storage choice to throughput, resilience, backup, and administration; connect a network design to traffic flows, security, hybrid access, and monitoring; connect VM sizing to SAP workload needs, scaling, and ongoing adjustment.
Review deployment through both the Azure portal and infrastructure-as-code concepts. Microsoft identifies the portal, Marketplace, Azure Resource Manager, and Bicep templates as tools used to manage SAP infrastructure. Your notes should distinguish an interactive deployment from a repeatable one and explain how parameters, dependencies, and change control affect the result.
A common mistake is to treat sizing as a one-time selection. The certification overview says the role recommends services and adjusts resources for optimal performance, scale, provisioning, and size. Practise explaining what evidence would justify an adjustment, which risk the change introduces, and how monitoring would confirm whether it solved the original problem.
Another mistake is to study SAP terminology without linking it to Azure administration. For every SAP component you review, identify the Azure compute, storage, network, identity, backup, and monitoring implications. Conversely, for every Azure service you study, ask how it would be used safely in an SAP landscape.
How should you prepare for HA/DR and maintenance?
Separate availability, disaster recovery, backup, and data protection in your notes, then connect them in a single operating plan. A strong answer to an HA/DR scenario must account for the failure being addressed, the recovery path, dependencies, testing, monitoring, and ownership—not just name a resilience feature.
Build failure-focused study cases. Start with a component failure, then consider a site or regional disruption, and finally consider data corruption or an operational mistake. For each case, record the expected service behavior, the restoration or failover process, the data protection mechanism, the validation method, and the actions required after recovery.
Review how storage, networking, compute, database technology, and SAP application components affect one another during recovery. A recovery design that restores a database but omits application connectivity, identity, name resolution, interfaces, or operational access is not complete. Use diagrams to show dependencies and mark which components are active, replicated, backed up, or rebuilt.
Maintenance study should include monitoring and adjustment. Microsoft describes the role as recommending and adjusting resources for resiliency, performance, scale, provisioning, size, and monitoring. Practise reading a hypothetical signal—such as a capacity or availability concern—and deciding what to investigate before changing a resource.
Include backup and restore exercises where the environment allows them. Record what is protected, how recovery is initiated, how integrity is checked, and how the result is communicated. Do not confuse a successful backup job with a demonstrated recovery capability.
The most frequent conceptual error is choosing the most elaborate architecture without checking the stated requirement. Scenario questions reward fit. Start with the recovery or availability need, identify constraints, then select the simplest supported design that meets them and can be operated by the stated team.
Which official resources are worth using?
Use the AZ-120 study guide as the central navigation document, then add Microsoft Learn training, the related course, exam-preparation videos, the sandbox, and any available practice assessment. Each resource serves a different purpose: the guide defines scope, training builds knowledge, labs build execution, videos clarify difficult objectives, and the sandbox reduces interface uncertainty.
Microsoft’s exam-preparation guidance says study guides summarize covered topics and link to self-study options, classroom training, documentation, community resources, and exam-preparation videos. Start there rather than searching broadly for an unofficial syllabus. Recheck the guide near scheduling because exam objectives and localized versions can change.
The AZ-120T00-A course is titled Planning and Deploying SAP on Azure. Microsoft lists it as an advanced course with a course duration of 3 days and says it is available in English, Chinese (Simplified), and Japanese. Its description covers deployment and configuration of virtual machines, virtual networks, storage accounts, identity, hybrid connectivity, backup, network traffic, and monitoring, alongside SAP migration and operation.
Use the Exam Readiness Zone after you have completed some training or practice, although Microsoft notes that the videos can be watched at any point in the certification journey. The videos are organized around major topic areas and are intended to highlight difficult objectives, preparation strategies, and example questions with explanations.
The supplied Practice Assessments catalogue does not list AZ-120. Microsoft’s general practice-assessment guidance explains that assessments, when available for an exam, are free, can be attempted as many times as desired, and are examples rather than live exam content. Check the official availability page directly rather than assuming that a similarly named assessment covers AZ-120.
Microsoft also provides an exam sandbox so candidates can experience the look and feel of the exam and interact with different question types. Use it shortly before the exam to learn the interface. It cannot replace SAP and Azure experience, and it should not be used as evidence that you know the measured skills.
What are the delivery and scheduling details?
The AZ-120 assessment is proctored and may include interactive components. Microsoft states that candidates have 100 minutes to complete it, and a score of 700 or greater is required to pass. Confirm the live exam details before scheduling because Microsoft can update delivery, language, and policy information.
The certification page lists English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese (Brazil) as exam languages in the supplied research. The study guide says other available languages are listed in the Schedule Exam section. Check the current scheduling page for the language and delivery option available to you.
Microsoft says that if the exam is not available in your preferred language, you can request an additional 30 minutes. Treat this as an accommodation or policy question to resolve before booking, not as time to assume will be added automatically. Review the official request and scheduling instructions for your circumstances.
Register through the official scheduling route and use a personal Microsoft account where possible. Microsoft strongly recommends a personal MSA account because exam records associated with an organizational work or school account may be lost and unrecoverable if you leave that organization.
The certification page states that price is based on the country or region in which the exam is proctored. Because the supplied research does not give a universal price, check the live booking flow for the amount applicable to your location rather than relying on a third-party listing.
The official page says that a failed certification exam can be retaken 24 hours after the first attempt, while subsequent retake timing varies. This is a recovery policy, not a study strategy. Do not schedule an attempt simply to obtain a score report; schedule when your skills review and practical work show a defensible readiness level.
What should a practical study roadmap look like?
A useful roadmap has four phases: scope and diagnosis, platform foundations, SAP workload scenarios, and final verification. Set the length of each phase according to your existing experience rather than copying a fixed calendar. The exit test for every phase is an observable capability, such as explaining a design or completing a lab, not merely finishing videos.
Phase one: establish scope. Read the current study guide, record the four measured domains, and inventory your SAP and Azure experience. Note whether you are preparing against the current English objectives or a localized version, since Microsoft says English is updated first and localized versions may follow a different schedule. Identify the two or three gaps that could invalidate the rest of your plan.
Phase two: strengthen the platform. Work through Azure compute, storage, networking, identity, hybrid connectivity, backup, monitoring, and infrastructure deployment. Use short Learn modules for unfamiliar concepts, then perform a focused lab. Finish by drawing a complete SAP-on-Azure platform and explaining each major dependency to another technical person.
Phase three: practise workload scenarios. Create one migration plan, one infrastructure design, one HA/DR design, and one maintenance runbook. For each, state assumptions, requirements, selected services or patterns, security and operational implications, validation steps, and failure handling. Review the designs against every objective in the study guide and revise unsupported assumptions.
Phase four: verify readiness. Revisit weak objectives, watch relevant Exam Readiness Zone segments, use the sandbox, and check whether an AZ-120 practice assessment is available through Microsoft’s current catalogue. If an assessment is available, use incorrect answers to locate gaps rather than memorizing wording. If it is not listed, use objective-based self-testing and lab evidence instead.
Schedule only after you can move between design and implementation. You should be able to explain why a resource choice fits the SAP requirement, how it will be deployed, how it will be monitored, how it will be recovered, and which team owns the operation. If you can only repeat a definition, return to a lab or design exercise.
A repeatable weekly study cycle
Use each study session for one knowledge block, one practical action, and one written explanation. For example, review storage concepts, configure or inspect a storage scenario, and then write how the decision affects performance, resilience, backup, and operations. This cycle exposes gaps faster than passive reading.
At the end of the week, select one mixed scenario that crosses domains. Ask what changes if the workload is being migrated, if availability is required during maintenance, or if recovery must include dependent services. Keep the scenario original and hypothetical; the purpose is reasoning practice, not reconstruction of exam questions.
How can you avoid common preparation mistakes?
The biggest risks are studying outside the blueprint, confusing Azure familiarity with SAP readiness, and relying on memorization instead of operational reasoning. Avoid them by keeping the official study guide visible, testing every major topic through a decision or lab, and treating third-party claims about questions or passing guarantees as unreliable.
Do not build your plan around exam dumps, leaked questions, or promises that memorization guarantees a pass. Microsoft’s practice-assessment guidance explicitly says its questions are not the same as those on the exam and that assessments do not replace training or product experience. Ethical, objective-based preparation is also more durable when the platform changes.
Do not assume every feature you find in current product documentation belongs in the assessment. Microsoft says most questions cover generally available features, although preview features may appear when they are commonly used. Check the study guide and the status of a feature before giving it major study time.
Do not use unsupported blueprint percentages. The supplied official research names the domains but provides no percentage allocation. Allocate time from your skills inventory and the current objective list, then rebalance after labs or practice questions expose a weakness.
Do not mistake a course completion badge or a high practice result for proof of readiness. Explain the architecture without notes, perform the relevant task where possible, and troubleshoot a deliberately altered configuration. These checks measure applied understanding more realistically.
Do not leave account, language, accommodation, and exam-interface decisions until the appointment day. Connect your Microsoft certification profile, verify the current language and scheduling information, review accommodation requirements, and explore the sandbox in advance.
What should you do next?
Open the official AZ-120 study guide and compare its current objectives with your experience. Then decide whether your immediate priority is Azure administration, SAP architecture, migration, HA/DR, or operations. Book only after your practical evidence supports the decision, and use Microsoft’s live certification page to confirm delivery, language, timing, price, and policies.
Your next actions can be simple and specific: create the skills inventory, select one objective from each measured domain, schedule four focused lab or design exercises, review the related AZ-120T00-A course material, and test the exam sandbox. Recheck official updates before final scheduling, particularly if you are taking a localized version.
AZ-120 preparation is strongest when every study item answers an operational question: what is being migrated, which Azure design supports it, how does it remain available or recover, and how will the team maintain it? Keep that chain intact, document the assumptions behind your choices, and use the official sources below as the final reference for changing exam information.
Conclusion
AZ-120 rewards preparation that combines SAP judgment with Azure implementation skill. Use the official blueprint to control scope, practise the four measured domains through scenarios and labs, verify the current delivery details, and schedule when you can justify and operate your designs rather than recite them. This approach gives you a clear readiness test without depending on unsupported claims or recalled exam content.
Related exams
- AZ-104 exam — Microsoft Azure Administrator
- 77-725 exam — Microsoft Word 2016 Core: Document Creation, Collaboration and Communication (MOS)
- AZ-140 exam — Configuring and Operating Windows Virtual Desktop on Microsoft Azure
- 77-727 exam — Excel 2016: Core Data Analysis, Manipulation, and Presentation
- AZ-305 exam — Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
- 77-728 exam — Excel 2016 Expert: Interpreting Data for Insights
