Azure Bcdr: A Comprehensive Guide to Disaster Recovery

Azure Bcdr is a robust disaster recovery solution that helps you quickly recover your applications and data in the event of a disaster or outage.

Azure Bcdr replicates your data to a secondary location, ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime.

The solution is designed to be highly available, scalable, and secure, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes.

With Azure Bcdr, you can automate the replication process, reduce the risk of data loss, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Azure Backup enables businesses to create and store data backups using different agents. This allows organisations to create different types of backups and ensure the level of access for each.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a key component of Azure BCDR, providing disaster recovery for Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region. This ensures business continuity after failovers and during outages.

Organisations can use ASR to replicate VMware VMs to Azure, and also replicate on-premise VMs, physical servers, and workloads that operate on supported VMs or servers. This provides enhanced security and resilience compared to configuration servers.

Azure BCDR, or Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, is a critical component of Azure's cloud services. It's designed to ensure that your business stays up and running even in the face of unexpected disruptions.

Azure BCDR provides automated failover and failback capabilities to minimize downtime and data loss. This is achieved through the use of Azure Site Recovery, which replicates data and applications to a secondary region or data center.

Businesses can set up Azure BCDR to automatically switch to a secondary region in case of an outage, ensuring that critical services remain available to customers and employees. This level of redundancy is especially important for organizations that rely on cloud-based services for their core operations.

With Azure BCDR, you can also perform regular tests to ensure that your disaster recovery plan is working as intended. This helps identify potential issues before they become major problems.

Site Recovery is a crucial component of Azure BCDR that allows organisations to establish disaster recovery for their Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region. This process is known as VM Replication.

Organisations can replicate VMware VMs to Azure, which provides enhanced security and resilience compared to configuration servers. Additionally, ASR can be used to replicate on-premise VMs, physical servers, and workloads that operate on supported VMs or servers.

ASR seamlessly integrates with other BCDR technologies, enabling organisations to secure other BCDR aspects, such as SQL Server. This integration also allows organisations to use downloadable application scripts for integration.

The service uses application-consistent snapshots to replicate using multiple recovery points, which acquire memory data, disk data, and transactions that are still in progress. This eliminates data loss during planned failovers and keeps data loss during unexpected failovers at a minimum.

Azure BCDR offers several benefits that can help organizations like yours stay ahead of the game. One of the main advantages is that it provides increased availability, ensuring that your backups are always available, even in the event of an Azure incident, outage, or cyberattack.

You can replicate your VMs from a primary region to a secondary region with Azure Site Recovery, establishing disaster recovery for Azure VMs. This is a huge plus, as it gives you peace of mind knowing that your data is safe.

Azure BCDR also simplifies restores, making it easier to recover your data in case of a disaster. With Azure Site Recovery, you can replicate VMware VMs to Azure and enjoy enhanced security and resilience compared to configuration servers.

Here are some of the key benefits of Azure BCDR:

Azure BCDR also helps you achieve low recovery-point objective (RPO) and recovery-time objective (RTO) targets for any mission-critical workload in your organization. This means you can get back up and running quickly in case of a disaster, minimizing downtime and data loss.

The immutable Datto Cloud sets the standard for secure cloud infrastructure, guaranteeing data sovereignty with geographically distributed locations.

Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure provides hourly replication to the secure Datto Cloud, ensuring your workloads are protected and easily recoverable.

Cloud Deletion Defense is a key feature that safeguards against ransomware and other cybersecurity threats, giving you peace of mind and protecting your business.

Cloud Shared Responsibility is a concept that can be complex, but essentially it means that both the cloud provider and the user have responsibilities when it comes to security and data protection.

Microsoft Azure, like other cloud services, follows a shared responsibility model. This means that the cloud provider handles some security tasks, while the user is responsible for others.

Microsoft's own documentation emphasizes the importance of understanding this shared responsibility model. They state that it's critical to know which security tasks are handled by the cloud provider and which tasks are handled by the user.

Nearly a quarter of SMBs choose Microsoft Azure as their cloud foundation, but this also means they're responsible for protecting their clients' workloads and data within Azure. Having a separate backup location for Microsoft Azure and 365 data can be the difference between a business staying afloat or shutting down.

Native Azure Backup may seem like a convenient option, but it's not without its risks. Microsoft faces an average of 1,435 cyberattacks per day, and in 98% of cases, the perpetrators hit the backups first.

Using Native Azure Backup puts your backups at risk of being compromised, just like the production infrastructure. If there is an Azure incident, outage, or cyberattack, both your production infrastructure and your backups could be unavailable.

Native Azure Backup is also a single point of failure, making it vulnerable to outages and cyberattacks. This could lead to complete downtime for your organization.

File restores from native Azure backups are often more complicated than other backup solutions. You need to use additional services for disaster recovery and testing, which adds complexity to your stack.

Native Azure Backup is not an all-in-one solution. You need to use Azure Backup for backups and Azure Site Recovery for business continuity, which can add cost and complexity to your stack.

Here are some key risks associated with Native Azure Backup:

Data Immutability is a critical aspect of ensuring your backup data is recoverable in the event of a disaster or cyber attack. To achieve immutability, consider using Azure native backup services or leading 3rd party tools such as Commvault.

Ensuring your backups are immutable and indelible in nature is crucial to prevent data tampering or encryption. This can be achieved by storing at least one copy of backup data in an isolated, air-gapped tertiary environment.

Storing backup data in a separate Azure cloud availability zone in a separate Azure tenancy or in a completely independent cloud-hosted storage service can be a key strategy for protecting against ransomware. This approach guarantees data sovereignty.

Backup solutions equipped with early warning capabilities can detect unusual activity, providing an early indication of an attack. This gives an opportunity to stop the attack at source or at least limit its impact.

Scanning of your backup data is a requirement to validate it is free from contamination after an attack. Tools such as Microsoft Defender or best-in-class 3rd party tools like Commvault Threat Scan can automate the sanitisation and recovery of workloads to an isolated recovery environment.

Datto's Cloud Deletion Defense feature guarantees data sovereignty by storing backups in geographically distributed locations.

Microsoft faces an average of 1,435 cyberattacks per day, making it crucial to keep Azure backups out of Azure to avoid increased risk exposure.

To ensure backup data immutability, consider using leading 3rd party tools such as Commvault, which provides advanced automation features for DR testing and recovery.

Storing at least one copy of backup data in an isolated, air-gapped tertiary environment can be a key strategy for protecting against ransomware, as it makes it difficult for attackers to access and encrypt the data.

Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure provides hourly replication to the secure Datto Cloud, daily backup verification, and optimal recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) performance.

Axcient x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) for Microsoft Azure sends data straight to the secure Axcient Cloud, avoiding the risk of backing up Azure in Azure.

Tools such as Microsoft Defender or best-in-class 3rd party tools like Commvault Threat Scan can help automate the sanitisation and recovery of workloads to an isolated recovery environment (cleanroom) and from there return them to production.

Azure BCDR solutions offer a range of features and benefits that can help ensure business continuity and minimize downtime. One of the key benefits is increased availability, as separating backups from production infrastructure can prevent complete downtime in the event of an Azure incident or outage.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) allows for VM replication from a primary region to a secondary region, providing enhanced security and resilience. This feature is particularly useful for replicating VMware VMs to Azure, as well as on-premise VMs, physical servers, and workloads that operate on supported VMs or servers.

Some of the key features of ASR include easy integration with other BCDR technologies, failover consistency and flexibility, and the ability to replicate using multiple recovery points. This ensures that disaster recovery drills can be conducted without hindering ongoing replication.

Here are some of the key features and benefits of Azure BCDR solutions:

One of the biggest advantages of Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure is its predictable costs, which can be a game-changer for businesses that have struggled with complex public cloud bills.

This flat-fee solution eliminates the confusion of calculating monthly cloud bills, covering all BCDR expenses, including egress and virtualization.

You can expect to pay 30% lower costs compared to native solutions, which is a significant reduction that can help you maintain healthy margins.

With predictable costs, you can budget more accurately and avoid unexpected expenses that can derail your business plans.

Separating backups from production infrastructure has several benefits that can make a big difference for your organization.

Increased availability is one of the main advantages. If there's an Azure incident, outage, or cyberattack, your backups will still be available in a separate location, preventing complete downtime.

Simplified restores are another benefit. File restores from a separate backup location are typically easier than from native Azure backups, as you don't need additional disaster recovery and testing services.

Reducing complexity and cost is also a significant advantage. Using a separate backup solution can simplify your backup stack and reduce costs by eliminating the need for multiple Azure services that often don't deliver a good profit margin for an MSP.

Separating backups from production infrastructure can increase availability, simplify restores, and reduce complexity and cost. This is because backups are stored in a separate location, making them less vulnerable to outages or cyberattacks.

File restores from a separate backup location are typically simpler than from native Azure backups. This is because you don't need additional disaster recovery and testing services.

Using a separate backup solution can reduce the complexity and cost of your backup stack. You don't need to use multiple Azure services, which often don't deliver a good profit margin for an MSP.

Some key features of Azure Site Recovery include VM replication, easy integration with other BCDR technologies, and failover consistency and flexibility. These features allow organizations to replicate and test operations without interfering with application data.

VM replication allows organizations to establish disaster recovery for Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region. This ensures that replication and testing operations occur without any interception of application data.

The key features of x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud with Microsoft Azure include direct-to-cloud backup of Azure VMs to the Axcient cloud, flat fee per month with pooled storage, and always-on AirGap anti-ransomware security technology.

Here are some of the key features of x360Recover D2C for Azure:

Datto Cloud sets the standard for secure cloud infrastructure, featuring immutable storage and geographically distributed locations that guarantee data sovereignty. This ensures that data is protected against cyber threats and ransomware.