Minimize disruption with cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solutions on Azure

A top of mind concern among our customers is keeping their applications and data workloads running and recoverable in the case of unforeseen events or disasters. For example, COVID-19 has presented daunting challenges for IT, which are only compounded by growing threats from ransomware or setbacks related to technical or operational failure. These considerations further highlight the importance of a plan to ensure business continuity. IT admins are looking to cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions as part of their business continuity strategy because of the ability to quickly onboard, scale based on storage needs, remotely manage, and save costs by avoiding additional on-premises investments.

Azure provides native cloud solutions for customers to implement simple, secure and cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies for their applications and data whether they are on-premises or on Azure. Once enabled, customers benefit from minimal maintenance and monitoring overhead, remote management capabilities, enhanced security, and the ability to immutably recover services in a timely and orchestrated manner. Customers can also use their preferred backup and disaster recovery providers from a range of our partner solutions to extend their on-premises BCDR solutions to Azure.

All of this is possible without the need to learn new tools for configuration or management. Simply create an Azure Storage account and you have Petabytes of available offsite storage to add to your BCDR solution within a few minutes.

Reduce complexity, cost, and enhance security with Azure solutions

Azure Backup is a service designed to back up and restore data, and Azure Site Recovery is designed to perform seamless application disaster recovery. Together, these services provide a more complete backup and recovery solution that can be implemented and scaled with just a few clicks.

By not having to build on-premises solutions or maintain a costly secondary datacenter, users can reduce the cost of deploying, monitoring, and patching disaster recovery infrastructure. Azure Backup uses flexible policies to automatically allocate and manage storage to optimize cost and meet business objectives. Together, Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery use the underlying power of Azure’s highly available storage to store customer data. These native capabilities are available through a pay-as-you-use model that only bills for storage consumed.

Azure’s centralized management interface for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery makes it simple and easy to define policies to natively protect a wide range of enterprise workloads including Azure Virtual Machines, SQL and SAP databases, Azure File shares and on-premises Windows servers or Linux VMs. Using Azure Site Recovery, users can set up and manage replication, failover, and failback from the Azure portal. Customers can also take advantage of the Windows Admin Center Azure Hybrid Services Hub to protect on-premises virtual machines (VMs) and enable Azure Backup and Site Recovery right from the Windows Admin Center console.

We are committed to providing the best-in-class security capabilities to protect customer resources on Azure. Azure Backup protects backups of on-premises and cloud-resources from ransomware attacks by isolating backup data from source data, combined with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and the ability to recover maliciously or accidentally deleted backup data. With Azure Site Recovery you can fail over VMs to the cloud or between cloud datacenters and secure them with network security groups.

Peace of mind is paramount when it comes to recovering from the unexpected. In the case of a disruption, accidental deletion, or corruption of data, customers can rest assured that they will be able to recover their business services and data in a timely and orchestrated manner. These native capabilities support low recovery-point objective (RPO) and recovery-time objective (RTO) targets for any critical workload. Azure is here to help customers pivot towards a strengthened BCDR strategy.

Extend solutions to Azure with our trusted partner ecosystem

We understand that organizations may be using an on-premises BCDR solution from another technology provider. A number of popular BCDR solutions are integrated with Azure enabling customers to extend their existing solutions into the cloud.

Some examples include:

• Commvault supports all tiers of Azure Storage as an offsite backup and data management target and enables backup and recovery from on-premises to Azure and for Azure VMs. Customers can quickly and easily restore applications, workloads and data to Azure as a cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) site and use Commvault Live Sync to achieve low recovery point objectives (RPOs).
• Rubrik offers built-for-Azure features like Smart Tiering for easy backup to Azure, cost-effective data storage in the tier of choice, and quick recovery of data and apps to Azure in the event of a disaster or for dev-test scenarios. Rubrik enables backup and recovery from on-premises to Azure and for Azure VMs.
• Veeam Backup and Replication integrates with Azure to easily protect and recover on-premises VMs, physical servers, and endpoints into Azure. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure leverages native Azure functionality and a built-in cost-calculator to provide an integrated, simple and cost-effective backup for Azure VMs.
• Veritas’ NetBackup and Backup Exec offer backup, disaster recovery and migration to Azure. NetBackup CloudCatalyst and CloudPoint enable backup and recovery of on-premises assets to Azure, and protection of Azure VMs respectively. NetBackup Resiliency enables integrated disaster recovery and migration experiences to Azure, between Azure regions and Azure Stack.

Discover the available partner solutions in the Azure Marketplace.

Learn more

Strengthen your BCDR strategy today by taking these next steps:

• Sign up for the webinar, Minimize Business Disruption with Azure BCDR Solutions.
• Review options to extend your current BCDR solution to Azure with our trusted partners.
• Get started with Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery today.

Source: Azure Blog Feed