You manage a mission-critical SaaS using Azure SQL Database. You need automatic cross-region failover with a single read-write listener and a separate read-only listener for reporting. Within each region, you also require high availability across Availability Zones. Which solution should you implement?

An auto-failover group provides automatic cross-region failover with a single read-write listener and a separate read-only listener, fulfilling the core requirements. Enabling zone redundancy for the databases within both the primary and secondary regions ensures high availability across Availability Zones, protecting against datacenter-level failures. Active geo-replication requires manual failover for the primary database. Read Scale-Out is for a single database within a region and doesn't provide cross-region failover. Geo-replicated backups are for disaster recovery, not automatic failover, and scaling up to premium doesn't inherently provide cross-region HA. Elastic pools with read replicas across regions would require custom failover logic and traffic management, which is less integrated than auto-failover groups.