Complete Azure Offsite Backup and Disaster Recovery Guide

Azure offsite backup is a game-changer for businesses of all sizes, providing a secure and reliable way to protect your data from disasters and cyber threats.

With Azure's cloud-based infrastructure, you can store your backups offsite, ensuring they're always safe and accessible. This means you can focus on your business, knowing your data is protected.

Azure offers a range of backup solutions, including Azure Backup, which allows you to back up your data to the cloud, and Azure Site Recovery, which provides business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.

By using Azure offsite backup, you can reduce the risk of data loss and downtime, and ensure your business can recover quickly in the event of a disaster.

Azure Offsite Backup offers a range of storage options to ensure your data is safely backed up.

You can choose between locally redundant storage (LRS), zone-redundant storage (ZRS), geo-redundant storage (GRS), and read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) for your backups.

Azure Backup also provides a feature called Instant Restore, which creates snapshots that are charged as Disk snapshots.

Azure Backup is a cloud-based backup solution that provides consistent copies with security features and management controls via the Azure portal.

The cost of Azure Backup storage varies depending on the storage option you choose. Here's a breakdown of the costs:

Azure Backup offers a feature called Reserved Capacity, which allows you to lower your backup data storage cost by committing to one-year or three-years of Azure Backup Storage.

Azure Backup offers a cloud-based solution for backing up your data, and it's surprisingly easy to configure and use. It provides consistent copies of your data with security features and management controls via the Azure portal.

The pricing model for Azure Backup has two components, which appear as separate line items on your monthly Azure bill. This is a change from the previous pricing model.

A protected instance refers to the computer, physical or virtual server you use to configure the backup to Azure. This can include virtual machines, application servers, and personal computers running the Windows operating system.

Instances are classified into three categories based on their size, and the price per protected instance depends on this categorization. You can find the pricing table in the Azure portal, but note that storage costs are a separate charge.

You won't be charged for any restore operations or outbound network bandwidth associated with restore operations. This is a welcome feature for customers who need to restore their data quickly.

Here's a breakdown of the three instance categories:

The new pricing model will be applicable to all Azure Backup customers, so you can expect to see the changes on your next bill.

Here's how Azure Offsite Backup works: it uses cloud-based storage to back up your data, ensuring it's safe and secure.

Azure Offsite Backup takes a snapshot of your data at regular intervals, which can be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your needs.

These snapshots are then stored in a secure, cloud-based repository, where they're protected from data loss and corruption.

Azure Offsite Backup also provides a robust recovery process, which allows you to restore your data in the event of a disaster or data loss.

Azure offers three durable storage options for your offsite backups: locally redundant storage (LRS), geo-redundant storage (GRS), and zone-redundant storage (ZRS).

With LRS, your backups are stored in the same region where your Azure backup vault is located, providing high durability and availability.

GRS, on the other hand, stores your backups in multiple regions, ensuring your data is protected against regional outages and disasters.

ZRS, a newer option, stores your backups across multiple zones within a region, providing an additional layer of redundancy and durability.

Here are the storage options and their associated costs:

These storage options give you the flexibility to choose the right balance between cost and durability for your offsite backups.

Separating backups from production infrastructure can increase availability and prevent complete downtime for your organization. This is because backups will still be available in a separate location, even if there is an Azure incident, outage, or cyberattack.

Simplifying restores is another benefit of separating backups. File restores from a separate backup location are typically simpler 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 of using a separate backup solution. This is because you don't need to use multiple Azure services, which can be costly and complicated to manage.

Here are some key benefits of using a separate backup solution:

By separating backups from production infrastructure, you can sleep more soundly at night knowing that your organization's data is protected and easily recoverable.

Azure offsite backup provides robust security and protection for your critical data. You can protect your SaaS, cloud-native, and on-prem data sources with an enterprise-class cloud backup service.

Data is securely backed up with multiple layers of protection, including role-based access control, soft delete, and customer-managed keys that use 256-bit AES encryption.

Azure Backup is a cost-effective, secure, one-click backup solution that's scalable based on your backup storage needs. It provides a centralized management interface to define backup policies and protect a wide range of enterprise workloads.

Here are some key security capabilities:

In today's digital age, it's crucial to have a solid backup plan in place to ensure business continuity. MSPs should be backing up their client public cloud data as they have a "co-management responsibility" to not rely on cloud providers to be the sole steward of their client data.

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a widely accepted standard for data protection. It requires three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy offsite.

Having a 3-2-1 backup plan is especially important for public cloud data, as cloud providers can go down. Axcient's Direct-to-Cloud BCDR can satisfy the 3-2-1 backup rule by securing your client's public cloud data with a 3rd party.

MSPs can leverage the Local Cache, Azure fileshare, and virtualize in the Axcient cloud to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup rule. This ensures redundancy for applications, endpoints, and data running within Azure.

You can grant fine-grained access to users for specific backup operations using role-based access control (RBAC). This ensures that only authorized personnel can perform critical backup operations.

To prevent accidental data loss, you can retain backups for 14 days after deletion with soft delete. This feature is a safeguard against data loss and ensures that your backups are safe.

Multiple-user authentication can be enabled as an additional layer of authorization for critical operations, protecting your data against ransomware attacks. This adds an extra layer of security to your backup operations.

Customer-managed keys that use 256-bit AES encryption can be used to fully control how to protect and access your data. This ensures that your data is secure and protected.

Secure transfer of backups to Azure Backup storage can be enabled with private endpoints. This ensures that your backups are transferred securely and privately.

To ensure availability, you can use zone- and geo-redundant storage, and restore backups from a paired region at any time. This ensures that your backups are always available and can be restored in case of a disaster.

Here are the security capabilities that can be used to secure your backups:

Managing your Azure data at scale is a breeze with Azure Backup. You can manage and monitor your entire backup estate from a central console with Backup Center.

Backup Center lets you manage your backup data at scale, which is a huge relief. With it, you can enforce backups at scale using Azure Policy, ensuring your data is always protected.

Azure Policy helps you stay compliant by enforcing backups at scale, giving you peace of mind. You can also use Backup reports to audit and analyze your backup data, identifying any patterns or issues.

To take your backup management to the next level, you can use APIs, PowerShell, and Azure CLI to automate backup policy and security configurations. This saves you time and reduces the risk of human error.

Here are some key features of managing backup data at scale with Azure Backup: