Are you looking to find out more about Microsoft Azure and what it provides in the case of a disaster recovery? The truth is, there are many different services and protections in place when using Microsoft Azure. You will find there is the ability to automate replication and protection of your virtual machines, as well as completely customizable recovery plans. Microsoft offers remote health monitoring, recovery plan testing, and more.
We’ll look at some of the great features available through Microsoft Azure so you can determine if what you need is provided.
Site Recovery Service
Site Recovery in Microsoft Azure helps to ensure your business keeps running, even if your onsite primary server goes down. Site Recovery keeps apps and workloads running on both physical and virtual machines, so you can gain access to these things even in a disaster situation. It will continue to recover and run these workloads until your regular server is available again.
Backup Service
At the same time, Azure Backup makes sure that your data is kept safe and is recoverable by making timely backups to Azure.
Site Recovery Solutions
There are many options to choose from when using Site Recovery on Microsoft Azure. We’ll look at some of the most common ones below, so you get an idea of what sort of options you have.
- Managing network settings – Allows for reserving IP addresses, application network management, integrating Azure Traffic Manager, and configuring load balancers.
- Integration with automation – The Automation library offers application specific and production ready scripts that can be used and integrated with Site Recovery.
- Integration with DR technology – Site Recovery integrated with DR technologies to protect the backend, manage failover, and more.
- Creation of recovery plans – Allows customization of failover and recovery of applications with multiple VMS. You can group machines with plans, add scripts, and add manual actions.
- Run flexible failovers – This allows you to run failovers for outages that are expected with no data loss or unplanned failovers with little data loss.
- Non-disruptive testing – Test failovers can be done easily for recovery drills, will not affect replications.
- Consistent apps – Configuration of recovery points with app consistent snapshots is available, captures disk data, data in memory, and all transactions going on.
- Reaching RTOs and RPOs – Site Recovery provides constant replication for Azure VMs which can reduce recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.
- Keep data secure – Orchestrates replication without having a need to intercept app data, data is stored in Azure, with VMs created from data in DR.
- Replication of workload – All workloads running can be replicated on Azure VMs and other servers.
- Replication of on-premises VMS offsite – Can replicate to onsite or offsite server location, eliminating the need for a secondary data center.
- Replication of Azure VMs – DR strategy can be set that VMs are replicated between different Azure regions.
- Deploy DR solutions – Site Recovery allows you to manage failover, replication, and failback form the Azure portal.
Replication Options
When it comes to replication, Azure allows you to replicate between Azure regions on Azure VMs. You can also replicate from onsite VMware VMs, Hyper V VMs, and physical servers to Azure servers or to a secondary site. You can find out more about what regions are supported for Site Recovery on the Microsoft website.
As you can see, Microsoft Azure has many different services and options that can help you fill out your disaster recovery strategy. It is an excellent service for many businesses in that there are many resources for doing so, as Azure is a very popular option when it comes to cloud based DR.