Final answer:
Availability Zones protect against data center and hardware failures by spreading resources across geographically separate areas within a region. While they help with network and hardware resilience, they are not primarily designed to prevent data corruption.
Step-by-step explanation:
Availability Zones are designed to protect against various types of failures that can affect data centers. They are especially useful in guarding against data center failures, which can occur due to events like natural disasters, power outages, or other large-scale disruptions. By distributing resources across multiple, geographically separate Availability Zones within a region, they also offer protection against hardware failures and facilitate continuous operations and redundancy.
However, it should be noted that while Availability Zones can mitigate the risk of network and hardware failures within a data center, they're not primarily designed to prevent data corruption. Data corruption may need additional mechanisms like error-checking and backup systems. To comprehensively protect against all these types of failures, it's often recommended to use a combination of Availability Zones, robust backup solutions, and other sound architectural practices.