Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup, together support an end to end business continuity and disaster recovery solution

In Azure there are two core services that you’ll want to take advantage of: Azure Site Recovery or (ASR) and Azure Backup.

Both ASR and Azure Backup complement each other to provide you with an end to end business continuity and disaster recovery solution with unlimited scale.

In the case of an outage, this allows you to recover your business services in a timely and orchestrated manner and safeguards the recovery of your data in the event of accidental deletion, corruption and even ransomware.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery in AzureLearn how you can use Azure’s global cloud platform to keep your business-critical services up and running and how to protect and restore your data from a specific point in time as part of a business continuity and disaster recovery plan for your organization.

FailoverBusiness EventRansomware

Denial of Service Attack

On premises to Azure

Azure to Azure

Backup

Microsoft Azure Essentials

Azure Site Recovery (ASR)

With ASR, you can replicate Azure VMs between Azure regions or you can replicate on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure. In this case, Azure Site Recovery will coordinate virtual-machine and physical-server failover from your primary site to Azure and can fail back to the primary location once it is running again.

Additionally, Azure Site Recovery integrates with other business continuity and disaster recovery services. For example, it can protect your important SQL Server workloads by managing the failover of SQL Server Always-on availability groups.

ASR offers best in class Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) so that if your service goes down it can be back up in minutes.

Application-consistent snapshots which capture disk data and transactions in process are mapped to your specified recovery points to keep your Apps consistent during failover.

You can also customize the orchestration sequence for the failover and recovery of multi-tier applications running on multiple VMs. If you prefer, you can also automate recovery steps by taking advantage of our Azure Automation library of application-specific scripts. You can also use your own scripts or opt to manually initiate recovery from the Azure Portal.

ASR uses the network management capabilities in Azure such as reserving IP addresses and controlling load balancers and can be used with Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switchovers.

Application snapshots ensure consistency during failover

Building your recovery plan in Azure

Azure Backup With Azure Backup as part of your business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you can ensure that your important data is backed up whether it lives on-premises or in the Cloud. You can configure the service to your specific Recovery Point Objectives.

Configuring your backup policies in Azure Backup

Based on your goals, Azure Backup takes multiple snapshots of your data to give you the flexibility to restore your business back to a specific period in time. For example, you can ensure that your database is backed up every fifteen minutes or that your Virtual Machines backup daily.

If you have VMs running in Azure, you can configure your backup and retention schedule to recover your VMs as well as their content such as files and folders. The backups are application consistent in nature and you don't need any additional infrastructure for this to work.

On-premises backup options to Azure

If on the other hand you are looking to backup your on-premises resources, Azure Backup gives you a wide variety of backup options. You can for example, just choose to do a general backup of your Hyper-V and VMWare virtual machines from your data center and even capture system state on your physical machines to do a bare metal recovery if needed.

Equally, you can choose to back up your files and folders or the data in specific workloads such as Exchange email data, or data stored in SQL or in SharePoint.

Synchronizing data between your last backup point

In Azure Backup, your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and you as the customer hold the encryption keys.

To understand more about your backup options, it’s a good idea to refer to the Azure Backup Server Protection Matrix which also details known constraints. Once your data is copied to Azure, it will synchronize only the delta in data between your last backup point, saving you time and internet connection charges and you can even ship your data offline to Azure if that's preferable.

Protection Against Ransomware

With your data backed up in Azure, you can also take advantage of the additional built-in protections. For example, we know that most Ransomware attacks typically attempt to gain control of your back-up process by deleting previous data backups. To help mitigate this threat, when you set up Azure Backup you can configure your recovery services vault for Multi-factor Authentication. This ensures that a security pin is generated to perform critical operations such as updating or removing a recovery point.

Ransomware attacks target data backups

Multifactor Authentication and Security Pin protection

Set-up

Both services require you to set up a Recovery Services Vault to hold your settings, monitoring and reports, policies, protected items, and site recovery plan as well as backup items, backup jobs and backup usage logs.

Recovery Services Vault in ASR

Recovery Services Vault in Azure Backup

Set-up steps for Azure to Azure failover

Selecting the frequency of your data backups

Storage for your protected data comes in two flavors: Locally redundant storage (LRS) or Geo-redundant storage (GRS). LRS is a low-cost option for protecting your data from local hardware failures in Azure. GRS on the other hand, provides a higher level of durability for your data even if there is a regional outage. As always, you only pay for the storage that you consume.

For the specific pre-requisites and to learn more about the set-up experience visit the following links: aka.ms/ASRGuidance and aka.ms/AzureBackupGuidance. Azure Backup storage options

For Azure Backup, if you are backing up from Azure, you just need to select the VM resources that you want to back up and in a few steps you are done.

The steps include selecting your backup goal, the frequencies of your backups and how long you want to retain your backups to meet compliance purposes.

If, on the other hand, you are backing up your data center resources, you’ll need to choose the on-premises data sources that you want to back up to Azure and prep your on-premises infrastructure.

Next, you follow a step by step wizard experience that walks you through the information needed to ensure that your environment is replicated, and your data protected.

For ASR, this includes setting the target for where your applications will land in Azure, the virtual machines you’ll want to replicate, as well as preparing your recovery plan.

Establishing data retention goals in Azure Backup

Planning for Failover and Data Backup

Of course, before you set up these services, getting the most effective use of Azure to handle the back up of your services and data, takes some planning.

For Azure Backup, data is kept by default for 30 days, and so you will want to extend this period to support your specific data retention goals which could be many years to meet your regulatory requirements.

For ASR on the other hand, you'll need to determine which VMs to replicate by assessing the impact to your business if the specific apps and workloads that you run experience downtime.

Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner tool report in Microsoft Excel

To support deployment planning, the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner is a command-line tool that allows you to remotely profile your VMs to understand the bandwidth and storage requirements for successful replication and failover based on your recovery point objectives. You can run the tool without installing any site recovery components on-premises and it also gives you an estimated disaster recovery cost for failover to Azure.

Monitoring

As you shift to manage failover and data backup with Azure, you also benefit from built-in monitoring tools.

In Azure Site Recovery, out of the box monitoring helps you to continually oversee your business continuity objectives. You can also choose to receive email notifications for critical events, so that you are able to proactively address any issues that may impact your ability to react to a disaster. Azure Recovery Vault monitoring dashboard in ASR

Azure Recovery Vault monitoring dashboard in Azure Backup

Furthermore, in Azure Backup, the Recovery Vault dashboard gives you visibility into the list of backup jobs, alerts for failed backup jobs, restore jobs and delete operations. Similarly, you can set up email notifications for alerts or push monitoring data to a Log Analytics workspace or Power BI for a holistic view across all of your Azure subscriptions.

Continued LearningMicrosoft Mechanics

Additional Learning Resources

Quickstarts

Learning Paths

Taking advantage of Azure's global cloud platform can help keep your business-critical services up and running, and protect and restore your data from a specific point in time as part of a business continuity and disaster recovery plan for your organization. Both ASR and Azure Backup are built into Azure, so if you have an Azure subscription you can get started today and ASR is free to use for the first 31 days.

An overview of business continuity and disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure

Steps to securing and managing your VMs in production with Azure

Amping up your disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery

Site Recovery Learning Path

Azure Administration

Recovering Data in Azure and SQL Server

Backup Videos

Site Recovery Videos

Site Recovery - Azure Portal

Backup - Azure Portal

Backup - PowerShell

Backup - Azure CLI