Business continuity should be a key priority for any business – after all, downtime costs the average SMB around $10,000 per hour. The good news is that a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy can minimize your downtime and protect your business data when you need it most.

Our suggestion? You need Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery services. Here’s how the recovery solutions work and why Azure is flexible enough for every business environment.

What is Azure Disaster Recovery?

Azure offers businesses two types of services that contribute to business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). They are:

  1. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) – DRaaS
  2. Azure Backup – BaaS

Combined, these solutions offer a comprehensive disaster management strategy that’s scalable to your unique business needs. Some organizations may think that backup is sufficient for disaster recovery. However, when a business experiences an important IT outage, they realize sooner than later that having copies of data is not enough to keep the business running. That is why Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup go hand in hand. To see why, let’s look at each option in turn, starting with Azure Site Recovery.

How does ASR work?

Azure Site Recovery is what’s known as a DRaaS, or Disaster Recovery as a Service. It’s a cloud-based tool that allows you to quickly recover from a disaster without losing your on-site workloads. Let’s break down its key features.

Customized DR

With ASR, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to business continuity. Instead, with the help of a managed IT specialist, you can design an entirely customized  disaster recovery plan to suit your own requirements.

Service level management

Service management is central to ASR. Near zero data loss can be achieved to meet existing Recovery point objectives (RPOs). This means there’s minimal downtime and data loss, or business disruption.

Workload replication

ASR seamlessly migrates your on-site workloads and apps to various secondary sites including Azure’s own virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers. So whether you’re looking for on-site or remote management, ASR ensures you don’t lose any critical data.

Failover

Outages are no problem when you deploy ASR across your business. If there’s an outage, all you do is log in to your secondary location and access your replicated workloads from there.

Fail back

Want to switch back from your failover site to your primary environment? No problem. ASR lets you move straight back to your original environment without losing any data or changes you’ve made to files.

Who is Azure Site Recovery for?

Azure Site Recovery is dynamic enough to work across both hybrid and cloud-only environments. The service supports:

  • Physical workloads including Linux and Windows servers
  • Virtual workloads such as Hyper-V and VMware

Here’s a little more detail on how it works.

Azure to Azure

Azure simply replicates your virtual machine(s) from one region to another. Since there is no need for you to maintain a secondary physical datacenter, you can drive down costs and improve your operational efficiency.

On-premises to Azure

If you’re working from a physical server, Azure replicates the data in real-time to an Azure Recovery Services Vault. This provides an almost-instant failover process with minimal downtime.

Running a hybrid environment? No problem. Azure migrates apps and workloads from your cloud and physical server environments without inconsistency or performance glitches.

What is Azure Backup?

Azure Backup is what’s known as BaaS, or Backup as a Service, which offers functional backup solutions for all cloud-based and on-premises data. It covers everything from VMs, physical servers, SQL server, to files and folders and it offers a cost-effective solution to traditional on-site backup centers. Here are the top benefits of Azure Backup you should know about.

Scalability

Azure backup demonstrates its full power as a cloud backup solution. There is no limit to the amount of data transferred no matter the size or need. What’s more, the price, speed or availability remains the same.

Efficiency

You can easily manage and monitor your entire backup landscape from a single dashboard, with virtually no maintenance required, you can streamline your day-to-day efficiency.

Data security

You can set permissions to ensure only authorized personnel can access your critical backups, along with additional soft delete of backup data to even further protect against unwarranted deletion.

Azure Disaster Recovery Services: Enterprise benefits

Still not sure if Azure Disaster Recovery Services are for you? We’ll leave you with some key enterprise benefits to help you with your decision-making.

Security and availability

With advanced security features like multi-factor authentication and encryption, Azure Disaster Recovery Services help you fulfil your compliance requirements and protect your critical data. Azure Site Recovery guarantees 99.9% service availability with 24/7 support from Microsoft and Azure backup stores copies of your data in three different locations in the primary Azure data center and encrypts it before it leaves the source to ensure business continuity.

Simplicity

Azure Site Recovery streamlines and reduces significantly the complexity of deploying and maintaining DR infrastructure. Additionally, commissioning an ASR service and replicating your environment doesn’t require a huge learning curve as it only involves three steps and lets you manage your DR plans from a single location in the Azure portal.

Automation replication & efficiency

Downtime can cost your business a lot of money and Azure Site Recovery helps you reduce downtime and damages thanks to 2 leading KPIs: RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Users are provided with low RPO threshold and RTO can be minimized through automation and Azure Traffic Manager which will make your DR process efficient and repeatable.

Cost-efficiency

Software as a Service (SaaS) tools like these allow you to scale your IT solutions in a cost-effective, manageable way without incurring new hardware costs or overheads.

Integrates with other BCDR technologies

Azure Site recovery integrates with other BCDR technologies. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, with native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn, to manage the failover of availability groups.

About Softlanding

Softlanding is a managed services provider committed to helping Canadian businesses thrive. For more information on Azure Backup and Disaster Recovery and how it can revolutionize your business, contact Softlanding today.

 

Written By:

softlanding

Softlanding is a long-established IT services provider of transformation, professional services and managed IT services that helps organizations boost innovation and drive business value. We are a multi-award-winning Microsoft Gold Partner with 13 Gold Competencies and we use our experience and expertise to be a trusted advisor to our clients. Headquartered in Vancouver, BC, we have staff and offices in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary to serve clients across Canada.

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