With most companies carrying out their activities online, there is a need to have a reliable cost-effective backup service that is not only convenient but also secure, simple to use, and enables business continuity during planned or unplanned outages. Well, in comes the Azure backup service! Azure enables organizations to implement Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery(BCDR) by providing Azure Site Recovery(ASR). Azure file shares, SQL database, Azure Virtual Machines, and SAP databases are some of the workloads in the extensive range within the enterprise whose backup policies are easily defined by Azure’s centralized management system.

Why should I use Azure?

Azure backup service is a sure way of ensuring the original data is kept safe from any possibility of accidental destruction due to its isolated and independent backup system. The backups are easily restored whenever there is a need to and scalability is quite simple as well.

Limitless data transfer: With the Azure Backup service, you get to enjoy unlimited inbound and outbound data transfer.

Data at rest stored in Azure backup service gets encrypted using Azure Storage encryption which provides a strong cipher block of 256-bit AES encryption, for the data in transit, protection is guaranteed as it is transferred over HTTPS.

Numerous storage alternatives: There are three highly available data storage options offered by Azure backup services, which you can choose from. They include Locally redundant storage (LRS), Geo-redundant storage GRS), and Zone-redundant storage (ZRS).

• LRS, Locally redundant storage; This is a considerably low-cost alternative to ensuring your data’s safety. Your data is replicated three times by the LRS while in a storage unit at the data center.
• GRS, Geo-redundant storage; Your data is replicated to a different location, also referred to as a secondary region, often located hundreds of miles from the primary source location. GRS is relatively more expensive than LRS but your data is more durable and is not affected by the regional outage.
• ZRS, Zone-redundant storage; If you have critical workloads which need data dependency, ZRS is the best option to consider. Your data is replicated in the availability zones, which means the data is guaranteed resiliency and residency within the same region

What can be backed up?

With the Azure backup service, you can back up the following;

• On-premises- back up folders, files, and system state using Microsoft Azure Recovery Services and Azure Backup Server for protection of VMs that are available on-premise
• SAP HANA databases
• Azure Blobs
• Azure Files shares
• SQL servers that are in Azure VMs and PostgreSQL databases which a retention period of up to 10 years
• Azure VMS-you can back up the whole Linux/Windows VMs by using the necessary backup extensions.

Azure Site Recovery

Outages, either planned or unplanned may occur, and to prevent data interference, organizations often have disaster recovery strategies to counteract the potential problem. For Azure, you can have Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provides Azure Site Recovery, ASR, that ensures the organizations’ activities continue uninterrupted during such outages. This is achieved as the ASR replicates the workloads and applications from the primary site to a secondary region or from one region to another

To have your data secured in the cloud, please reach us through sales@jasco.co.ke for more information.