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 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
Some organizations may think that backup is sufficient for disaster recovery. However, when a business experiences an important IT outage, it realizes 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 minimal downtime, data loss, or business disruption.
Workload replication
ASR seamlessly migrates your on-site workloads and apps to various secondary sites, including Azure’s 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.
Failback
Want to switch back from your failover site to your primary environment? No problem. ASR lets you return 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 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 you do not need 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.
High-level Architecture of Azure DR
SMB
Enterprise
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