Understanding Azure: backup and disaster recovery
Wednesday, August 1, 2018
New research from the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2018 suggests that 42% of micro and small businesses identified at least one breach or attack in the last 12 months – which is no lower than the 2017 survey[1]. Among those that were surveyed by the UK Government, 36% needed to take new measures to prevent or protect against future breaches, while 21% stated that breaches incurred further recovery or repair costs.
For small businesses, the financial costs and remediation following a breach can cause significant damage to their brand, leading to detrimental consequences. It’s within their best interests to choose the most cost-effective way to back up and restore their data through a Disaster Recovery (DR) implementation.
Backing up business-critical workloads or non-sensitive data in Azure is one of the ways to implement a DR process for your customers. Remember that Azure (and any VMs your customer currently has) will be replicated three times in an Azure Datacentre Region of your choice, but replication is not a substitute for data backup. You’ll still need Azure Backup to protect your customers data against ransomware, corruption or accidental deletion.
What is Azure Backup & Disaster Recovery (BCDR)?
Azure Backup is a simple solution that can decrease your infrastructure costs while giving you enhanced security to protect your data against ransomware. With one solution, you can protect workloads running in Azure and on-premises across Linux, Windows, VMware and Hyper-V. Combining it with a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution means you can instantly failover applications or data from one Azure region to another Azure region or site, allowing you to quickly recover from a potential breach, a network failure or power outage.
How can I implement a BCDR solution in Azure?
The Azure Site Recovery service can help you implement a simple BCDR solution for your customers. Not only will help ensure business continuity by keeping your workloads running during an outage, it also replicates workloads running on physical machines and VMs from a primary site to a secondary location. Site Recovery provides a full range of different DR options depending on your customer’s needs. For example, you can:
- Replicate on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure to eliminate the maintenance costs of a secondary datacentre.
- Test disaster recover by replication applications between Azure regions, without affecting ongoing replication.
- You can customise recovery plans for your customers and sequence the failover of applications or workloads running on multiple VMs.
- Integrate with the network for a simplified network management, including reserving IP addresses, load balancers etc.
- Keep to Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and help reduce it by using Azure Traffic Manager.
If your customers are concerned about placing sensitive data in the public cloud and would prefer to keep it on-premises, choosing a Hybrid Cloud deployment could be beneficial for them. We’ll cover this topic in a future ‘Understanding Azure’ blog. For more information on Azure Backup and Disaster Recovery services contact our Account Management team on 0333 332 0888.