Microsoft Azure Backup

What is Azure Backup?

Azure Backup is a simple and cost-effective backup-as-a-service solution that extends tried-and-trusted tools on-premises with rich and powerful tools in the cloud. It delivers protection for customers’ data no matter where it resides: in the enterprise data center, in remote and branch offices, or in the public cloud; while being sensitive to the unique requirements these scenarios pose. Azure Backup, now in a seamless portal experience with Azure Site Recovery, offers minimal maintenance and cost-efficiency, consistent tools for offsite backups and operational recovery, and unified application availability and data protection.

Why use Azure Backup?

Traditional backup solutions have evolved to treat the cloud as an endpoint, or static storage destination, similar to disks or tape. While this approach is simple, it is limited and doesn’t take full advantage of an underlying cloud platform, which translates to an expensive, inefficient solution. Other solutions are expensive because you end up paying for the wrong type of storage, or storage that you don’t need. Other solutions are often inefficient because they don’t offer you the type or amount of storage you need, or administrative tasks require too much time. In contrast, Azure Backup delivers these key benefits:

Automatic storage management

Hybrid environments often require heterogeneous storage – some on-premises and some in the cloud. With Azure Backup, there is no cost for using on-premises storage devices. Azure Backup automatically allocates and manages backup storage, and it uses a pay-as-you-use model. Pay-as-you-use means that you only pay for the storage that you consume.

Unlimited scaling

Azure Backup uses the underlying power and unlimited scale of the Azure cloud to deliver high-availability – with no maintenance or monitoring overhead. You can set up alerts to provide information about events, but you don’t need to worry about high-availability for your data in the cloud.

Multiple storage options

An aspect of high-availability is storage replication. Azure Backup offers two types of replication: locally redundant storage and geo-redundant storage. Choose the backup storage option based on need:

Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times (it creates three copies of your data) in a paired datacenter in the same region. LRS is a low-cost option for protecting your data from local hardware failures.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates your data to a secondary region (hundreds of miles away from the primary location of the source data). GRS costs more than LRS, but GRS provides a higher level of durability for your data, even if there is a regional outage.

Unlimited data transfer

Azure Backup does not limit the amount of inbound or outbound data you transfer. Azure Backup also does not charge for the data that is transferred. However, if you use the Azure Import/Export service to import large amounts of data, there is a cost associated with inbound data. Outbound data refers to data transferred from a Backup vault during a restore operation.

Data encryption

Data encryption allows for secure transmission and storage of your data in the public cloud. You store the encryption passphrase locally, and it is never transmitted or stored in Azure. If it is necessary to restore any of the data, only you have encryption passphrase, or key.

Application-consistent backup

Whether backing up a file server, virtual machine, or SQL database, you need to know that a recovery point has all required data to restore the backup copy. Azure Backup provides application-consistent backups, which ensured additional fixes are not needed to restore the data. Restoring application consistent data reduces the restoration time, allowing you to quickly return to a running state.

Long-term retention

Instead of switching backup copies from disk to tape and moving the tape to an off-site location, you can use Azure for short-term and long-term retention. Azure doesn’t limit the length of time data remains in a Backup or Recovery Services vault. You can keep data in a vault for as long as you like. Azure Backup has a limit of 9999 recovery points per protected instance.