By default, Microsoft replicates all data stored on Microsoft Azure Storage to the secondary location located in the paired region. Customers are able to enable or disable the replication. When enabled, customers are charged.
When Geo Redundant Storage has been enabled on a storage account, all data is asynchronous replicated. At the secondary location, data is stored on three different storage nodes. So even when two nodes fail, the data is still accessible.
However, before the read access Geo-Redundant feature was available, customers had no way to actually access replicated data. The replicated data could only be used by Microsoft when the primary storage could not be recovered again.
Microsoft will try everything to restore data in the primary location and avoid a so-called geo-failover process. A geo-failover process means that a storage account's secondary location (the replicated data) will be configured as the new primary location. The problem is that...