disaster recovery plan azure

Backup and disaster recovery

Back up your data and implement a disaster recovery strategy to avoid costly business interruption.

How can Azure help protect critical data and applications?

Azure offers an end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution that’s simple, secure, scalable, and cost-effective—and can be integrated with on-premises data protection solutions. In the case of service disruption or accidental deletion or corruption of data, recover your business services in a timely and orchestrated manner. The Azure backup and disaster recovery solution is simple to architect, cloud-native, highly available, and resilient.

Extend your current backup solution to Azure, or easily configure our application-aware replication and application-consistent backup that scales based on your business needs. The centralized management interface for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery makes it simple to define policies to natively protect, monitor, and manage enterprise workloads across hybrid and cloud. These include Azure Virtual Machines, SQL and SAP databases, on-premises Windows servers, and VMware machines.

Help safeguard your backup environment with built-in security for hybrid and cloud and  compliance  with wide-ranging security and privacy regulations. With Azure Site Recovery, configure VMs to fail over to the cloud or between cloud datacenters and help secure them with network security groups. Use Azure Backup to protect data from deletion and ransomware by  isolating backup data  from original data and through accidental delete protection and multifactor authentication.

Achieve low recovery-point objective (RPO) and recovery-time objective (RTO) targets for any mission-critical workload in your organization. Reduce the costs of deploying, monitoring, patching, and scaling on-premises disaster recovery infrastructure, without the need to manage backup resources or build a secondary datacenter. Azure provides a platform for a zero-infrastructure solution, with flexible policies to optimize backup storage.

Work with a preferred backup provider to strengthen your backup and disaster recovery strategy. Through native integration with Azure Blob storage and extending your existing solution through our partners, you can quickly back up and replicate your apps and data to Azure and store them cost-effectively in a storage tier of choice. This enables agile recovery of apps and data into Azure for disaster recovery and dev/test scenarios, without the need to learn new tools for configuration or management.

Backup and disaster recovery you can trust

80% reduction

in average data recovery time 1

5-year ROI 1

97% reduction

reduced lost end-user productivity from data loss 1

Learn more about our services for backup and disaster recovery

Azure Backup

Simplify data protection while saving costs.

Azure Site Recovery

Keep your business running with a disaster recovery service that is cloud native and built-in.

Azure Archive Storage

Store rarely used data in the cloud at an industry-leading price point.

Learn more through example solution architectures

Discover how Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery integrate to provide an end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution.

Back up on-premises applications and data to the cloud

Protect your on-premises data assets using Azure Backup through a simple, secure, and cost-effective solution.

Enterprise-scale disaster recovery

Host servers in an on-premises datacenter and failover to Azure infrastructure to ensure a patched and supported, highly-available environment.

Small and midsize business disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery

Small and medium businesses can inexpensively implement disaster recovery to the cloud by using Azure Site Recovery or a partner solution.

Stay up to date with the latest backup and disaster recovery resources

Extend your on-premises strategy to Azure with help from our partners

Commvault supports all tiers of Azure Storage as an off-site backup and data management target and enables backup and recovery from on-premises to Azure and for Azure virtual machines (VMs). Quickly and easily restore applications, workloads, and data to Azure as a cost-effective disaster recovery site. Use Commvault Live Sync to achieve low RPOs.

Rubrik offers built-for-Azure features like Smart Tiering easy backup to Azure, cost-effective data storage in the tier of choice, and intelligent instant recovery of data and apps to Azure in the event of a disaster or ransomware attack, or for dev/test scenarios. Rubrik enables backup and recovery from on-premises to Azure and for Azure VMs.

Veeam Backup & Replication integrates with Azure to easily protect and recover on-premises VMs, physical servers, and endpoints into Azure. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure leverages native Azure functionality and a built-in cost-calculator to provide integrated, simple, and cost-effective backup for Azure VMs.

Veritas’ NetBackup and Backup Exec offer backup, disaster recovery and Azure migration services. NetBackup CloudCatalyst and CloudPoint enable backup and recovery of on-premises assets to Azure and protection of Azure VMs, respectively. NetBackup Resiliency enables integrated disaster recovery and Azure migration experiences, between Azure regions and Azure Stack.

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Create and customize recovery plans

• 11 contributors

This article describes how to create and customize a recovery plan for failover in Azure Site Recovery . Before you start, learn more about recovery plans.

Create a recovery plan

In the Recovery Services vault, select Recovery Plans (Site Recovery) > +Recovery Plan .

In Create recovery plan , specify a name for the plan.

Choose a source and target based on the machines in the plan, and select Resource Manager for the deployment model. The source location must have machines that are enabled for failover and recovery.

Note the following:

• You can use a recovery plan for both failover to Azure and failback from Azure.
• The source location must have machines that are enabled for failover and recovery.
• A recovery plan can contain machines with the same source and target.
• You can include VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs managed by VMM, in the same plan.
• VMware VMs and physical servers can be in the same plan.
• All VMs in a recovery plan must replicate into a single subscription. If you want to replicate different VMs to different subscriptions, please use more than one recovery plan (one or more for each target subscription).

In Select items virtual machines , select the machines (or replication group) that you want to add to the plan. Then click OK .

• Machines are added default group (Group 1) in the plan. After failover, all machines in this group start at the same time.
• You can only select machines are in the source and target locations that you specified.

Click OK to create the plan.

Add a group to a plan

You create additional groups, and add machines to different groups so that you can specify different behavior on a group-by-group basis. For example, you can specify when machines in a group should start after failover, or specify customized actions per group.

• In Recovery Plans , right-click the plan > Customize . By default, after creating a plan all the machines you added to it are located in default Group 1.
• Click +Group . By default a new group is numbered in the order in which it's added. You can have up to seven groups.
• Select the machine you want to move to the new group, click Change group , and then select the new group. Alternatively, right-click the group name > Protected item , and add machines to the group. A machine or replication group can only belong to one group in a recovery plan.

Add a script or manual action

You can customize a recovery plan by adding a script or manual action. Note that:

If you're replicating to Azure you can integrate Azure automation runbooks into your recovery plan. Learn more .

If you're replicating Hyper-V VMs managed by System Center VMM, you can create a script on the on-premises VMM server, and include it in the recovery plan.

When you add a script, it adds a new set of actions for the group. For example, a set of pre-steps for Group 1 is created with the name Group 1: pre-steps . All pre-steps are listed inside this set. You can add a script on the primary site only if you have a VMM server deployed.

If you add a manual action, when the recovery plan runs, it stops at the point at which you inserted the manual action. A dialog box prompts you to specify that the manual action was completed.

To create a script on the VMM server, follow the instructions in this article .

Scripts can be applied during failover to the secondary site, and during failback from the secondary site to the primary. Support depends on your replication scenario:

• If you want the action to occur before the machines in the group are started after failover, select Add pre-action .
• If you want the action to occur after the machines in the group start after failover, select Add post action . To move the position of the action, select the Move Up or Move Down buttons.
• In Insert action , select Script or Manual action .
• Type in a name for the action, and type in action instructions. The person running the failover will see these instructions.
• Specify whether you want to add the manual action for all types of failover (Test, Failover, Planned failover (if relevant)). Then click OK .
• If you're adding a VMM script, select Failover to VMM script , and in Script Path type the relative path to the share. For example, if the share is located at \<VMMServerName>\MSSCVMMLibrary\RPScripts, specify the path: \RPScripts\RPScript.PS1.
• If you're adding an Azure automation run book, specify the Azure Automation Account in which the runbook is located, and select the appropriate Azure Runbook Script .
• Run a test failover of the recovery plan to ensure that the script works as expected.

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March 15, 2021

Topics: cloud volumes ontap azure disaster recovery elementary 9 minute read, what is azure disaster recovery.

A business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy helps organizations secure data, applications, and workloads during planned or unplanned outages.

 To help organizations implement BCDR, Azure provides Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR ensures business continuity during outages by replicating applications and workloads from their primary location to a secondary site.

This post covers two common DR architectures: Azure-to-Azure disaster recovery and physical server to Azure disaster recovery.

This article is part of our series of articles on Azure Backup .

In this article, you will learn:

What is Azure Site Recovery?

Snapshots and recovery points, replication process, failover process, failback process, azure disaster recovery with netapp cloud volumes ontap.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) that can be used in both public cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. It lets you use Azure as an on-demand disaster recovery site, without needing to invest in disaster recovery equipment upfront.

ASR creates replicas of computer systems which are synchronized through a near-real-time data replication process. It provides application-consistent snapshots, which make sure data is usable after a failover.

ASR provides support for several migration and disaster recovery scenarios:

• Replicating physical servers from on-premises data centers and other cloud providers to Azure
• Replicating virtual machines (VMs) (both Windows and Linux) running on VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure to Azure
• Replicating VMs (Windows only) from AWS to Azure
• Replicating VMs (both Windows and Linux) from Azure Stack, Azure’s hybrid cloud solution, to Azure

Azure to Azure DR with Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates Azure VMs to different regions, which serve as a secondary location. In case of an outage, organizations can use the secondary region to access their data and workloads - this is known as failover. Once the primary site works, normal operations can resume there - this is called failback.

Note: ASR is only supported between two regions in the same geographical cluster (for more details see the documentation ). VMs you want to replicate must run one of the supported operating systems (which include most popular versions of Windows and Linux).

Here are the components involved in this process:

•   VMs in the source region - one or more Azure VMs running in the source region.
• Source VM storage - Azure VMs that are either managed or using unmanaged disks that are distributed across storage accounts.
• Source VM networks - you can place VMs in 1 or more virtual network (VNet) subnets located in the source region.
• Cache storage account - should be in the source network. VM changes are stored in this cache before they are sent to a target storage. This can help reduce impact on production applications. Azure advises to use only Standard cache storage accounts.
• Target resources - used during replication and when outages occur. Site Recovery sets up the target resources by default. It is also possible to create and customize the resources.

Site Recovery takes snapshots of VM disks. By default, the system takes crash-consistent snapshots of data. It is possible to define a frequency, and then Site Recovery will take app-consistent snapshots.

The Site Recovery system uses snapshots to create recovery points, and then stores them according to the retention configurations pre-defined in the replication policy. Once a failure occurs, Site Recovery lets you restore a VM from a recovery point.

This process helps ensure VMs start with no data loss or corruption. Depending on the snapshot taken, the process also helps make sure VM data remains consistent for the OS and the applications running on the VM.

The replication process performs several actions. First, the system installs the service extension of Site Recovery Mobility on the virtual machine. The extension can then register the virtual machine with Site Recovery. Then, the system starts continuously replicating the VM, immediately transferring disk writes to the Standard cache storage that was set up in the source location.

During the next phase, Site Recovery starts processing cache data, sending it to replicated managed disks or to a storage account. When this is done, the system starts generating crash-consistent recovery points every 5 minutes. If the replication policy defined a process for app-consistent recovery points, these will be created too.

The following diagram shows what happens when you enable replication. ASR starts replicating disk data to the target environment. However, virtual machines are not started yet.

When you initiate a failover via ASR, VMs are created in the target region based on the virtual network, subnet, and availability set you defined, and the data previously replicated from the source environment.

Physical Server to Azure DR with Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery can also be used to replicate physical servers deployed in an on-premises data center to the Azure cloud.

Here are the components involved in the process:

• Azure subscription and network - data replicated from physical machines is copied to disks within your Azure subscription. When you perform a failover, Azure VMs are created from data in those disks, within an Azure virtual network of your choice.
• Process and configuration server - a replication gateway that receives data from local machines, applies caching, compression, and encryption, and copies to Azure storage. Also enables central management of the replication process. For large deployments, you may need several process servers, one for each group of machines.
• Master target server - also deployed on-premises, this server performs replication back to the on-premises data center during failback. As with process servers, several may be required for large deployments.
• Mobility service - installed on each service you want to replicate to Azure. Microsoft recommends automatically installing the mobility service from the process server. You can also install it manually if needed.

When replicating an on-premises physical server to Azure, replication works as follows:

1. You set up a deployment with local and Azure components. Recovery Services Vault specifies a replication source and destination, sets up a configuration server, creates a replication policy, and enables replication. 2. ASR replicates an initial copy of server data to Azure storage, using the predefined replication strategy. 3. When the first copy is complete, ASR begins copying incremental changes to Azure. Changes are tracked using a log file with extension .HRL. 4. Traffic can be rerouted to the new machine on Azure over the Internet or using Azure ExpressRoute with public peering.

In case of a disaster the failover process from the on-premises data center to Azure works as follows:

1. You select the VM you want to fail over. 2. You select a recovery point to fail over to. There are several options:     a. Latest - provides the lowest Recovery Point Objective (RPO), by failing over to the very latest version of the on-premises server. This option is crash consistent.     b. Latest processed - provides the lowest RTO (Recovery Time Objective) because it doesn’t wait for processing of the latest replicated data, instead using the latest version that is ready for failover. This option is also crash consistent.      c. Latest app-consistent - fails over using the latest recovery point that is app consistent, guaranteeing that application data is not corrupted.      d. Custom - lets you set a recovery point manually. 3. You can optionally shut down the source machine before starting the failover (but failover continues even if this fails) 4. Failover begins - the Azure Site Recovery Jobs page shows progress. 5. When failover ends, connect to the target VM to validate it works correctly, and then commit the failover. This deletes all other available recovery points.

After failing over to Azure, you may need to re-protect Azure VMs by replicating them back to the on-premises site. This is a detailed procedure - see the documentation for more details.

When your primary on-premises site is available again, you can fail back as follows.

Note: ASR failback requires a local VMware environment - even if you originally protected physical machines. ASR is only able to fail back to VMware VMs in your local data center.

In the ASR console, you select the VM you need to fail back, and request “unplanned failover”. Failback is called “failover” in ASR - make sure you select the failover direction as “from Azure”.

• You select the recovery point for failback - the same options are available as detailed in the failover process above. Microsoft recommends using Latest, a crash-consistent recovery point. You may lose some data if you select app-consistent.
• While failover is running, ASR shuts down the Azure VMs, and starts up the on-premises VMware VM. Expect some downtime during this process.
• Commit the failback - this starts a job that removes Azure VMs, as they are no longer needed. Microsoft advises verifying that VMs have shut down correctly.

See the Azure documentation for more details, and guidance for automating some of these steps for faster failover and recovery.

While Azure offers some capable disaster recovery solutions on its own, users can get more protection and better DR processes, all at a lower cost, with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP .

 Cloud Volumes ONTAP brings the trusted enterprise-class storage management features of on-prem ONTAP storage systems to Azure. It can reinforce your DR strategy in Azure , serving as the underlying storage management system, or serve as a DR storage management on its own . In either case, Cloud Volumes ONTAP adds value with features such as data replication, high availability, and storage efficiency, as we’ll see below.

Ensure Cloud Business Continuity

The Cloud Volumes ONTAP HA (High Availability) configuration for Azure uses shared storage between two Cloud Volumes ONTAP nodes that are part of different fault and update domains. In the event that one of the nodes becomes unavailable, the surviving node takes over and provides access to data without any disruption.

Easy Azure storage replication

Cloud Volumes ONTAP uses SnapMirror® technology to replicate data across hybrid and multicloud architectures. It can be used to replicate data to a secondary site for DR and keep it in sync. SnapMirror replication is set up using the simple drag-and-drop controls in NetApp Cloud Manager .

Failover and Failback

A failover can be initiated by breaking the replication relationship in SnapMirror. During failback the synchronization can be reversed and data from the DR site can be replicated back to the primary location.

Storage Efficiencies

Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s storage efficiency features , including thin-provisioning, data compression, deduplication, and data tiering, help to reduce the DR copy’s storage footprint and costs. These features are available out of the box and can be used by the customer with no configuration overheads.

FlexClone for DR Testing

Cloud Volumes ONTAP data cloning technology can be used to clone instant, writable volumes for DR testing that won’t affect ongoing operations. These volumes are created instantly, and with zero capacity penalty.

Product Evangelist

Best Practices for Cloud Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Azure

• March 25, 2021

In today’s cloud era, the ability to bounce back after downtime can make or break your business. Disaster recovery (DR) capabilities should therefore be a key consideration when choosing a cloud platform. Leveraging the cloud as a secondary data center for DR is often the first step in cloud adoption, and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offerings from various cloud service providers underline this fact.

Azure packs a punch with multiple DR options for services like VMs, storage, databases, and containers. In this blog post, I’ll explore these options and discuss how you can develop a robust business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy for your workloads hosted in Azure.

What to Consider When Creating Your DR Plan in Azure

Contrary to popular belief, applications hosted in the cloud are not foolproof—failures happen. Since application downtime can be disastrous for your business, you need a well-defined DR strategy to be prepared to handle failures. This strategy should cover the entire application stack, not just the services you think are important.

You might need to manually trigger the DR process yourself in order to differentiate between transient failures and actual downtimes. However, the failover process in Azure should be automated as much as possible. Configure alerts so you can stay informed about failures and take necessary actions to trigger your DR plan.

With Azure, you can choose to deploy application components across Azure regions to protect from regional failures. If applications are regional, you can deploy them in availability zones (physically separated zones within a region) to protect from data center failures. Your choice will depend on the type of resiliency you want to deliver for your application. In addition to a DR strategy that protects from cateroscopic failures, you should have a backup strategy for  preventing unavailability due to data corruption or application configuration.

Your DR strategy should also clearly define the DR process, which activities will be completed when the plan is triggered, and who will be responsible for executing the plan. However, a detailed DR strategy won’t really help unless you test and fine-tune it regularly. This is where services that offer non-disruptive DR testing, such as Azure’s DR solution, come into play. Similarly, executing a regular test restore of backups in a test environment will help avoid surprises during an eventuality.

Disaster Recovery in Azure: What Are Your Options?

Before developing a DR strategy, you should be clear about the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for your workloads. For example, if a bit of downtime is okay with you (i.e., non-prod and test environments), a complete redeployment of applications is a good choice. You can also choose to adopt an active/passive or warm-spare approach, where a scaled-down secondary service is ready to take over in the event of a failure. It’s most effective to use an active/active or hot-spare architecture, where instances of the application are available in multiple regions in order to accept production traffic.

Azure offers native capabilities built into most of its services, which can be leveraged to develop a well-rounded DR strategy. Note that it’s important to start from the ground up (i.e., covering infrastructure, if applicable, as well as data and application layers) in order to develop a comprehensive solution. Below I’ll explore the DR options for common Azure services.

Virtual Machines

Azure Site Recovery, Azure’s DRaaS offering, helps protect your VMs from outages by continuously replicating them to a different paired region. In the event of a disaster, the VMs can be failed over to the secondary region, and you can enable access from there. You can also fail back to the primary region once the outage is over. Organizations often use Azure Site Recovery to leverage Azure as their DR site, as it supports replicating VMs in VMware/Hyper-V or in physical machines to Azure.

Azure Backup is another solution you can include in the BCDR strategy for your VMs. You can use this cloud-based backup service to take point-in-time copies of data in the VMs. The backup copies can then be restored to bring your application back online in the event of data loss or corruption. For the highest level of availability and resiliency from failure, use a multi-region architecture , in which both primary and secondary regions are factored into the design.

An Azure Storage account can be deployed as geo-redundant, allowing data in the storage account to be replicated to the secondary region asynchronously. In case of an outage that renders the primary end point unavailable, you can initiate an account failover for Azure Storage. The failover process will cause the secondary endpoint to become the primary one so that applications can continue to use the storage. 

For Azure Blob, you can use snapshots to create read-only point-in-time copies of the data. Azure files can be protected through a scheduled Azure backup . You can also use the snapshot feature to create point-in-time copies of the data, similar to Azure Blob. If your application is utilizing Azure Table storage, use the AzCopy tool to copy the data to a different storage account in another Azure region for DR purposes.

Your DR strategy for databases will depend on whether you are using IaaS or PaaS as the deployment approach. For SQL Server and SAP HANA databases hosted in VMs, you can use the integrated Azure Backup feature to discover and configure regular backup without deploying any additional infrastructure. 

There are also managed databases like Azure SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Cosmos DB, delivered as PaaS services. For those databases, Azure offers an automated backup service that takes regular snapshot-based backups of the database to a separate storage account. If you need the backups to be retained for a longer period of time, Azure SQL offers a long-term backup retention feature that allows you to store your backup copies in a storage account for up to 10 years.  

Azure provides a robust ecosystem of services to support container-based workloads , including: 

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Azure Container Instances (ACI)

Azure App Service

• Azure Container Registry (ACR)

AKS uses VM scale sets that can protect your workloads from node failures. However, to protect from regional outages, you should consider multi-region deployments that leverage Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic to available regions.

It’s also important to segregate the process of recovering your application and data. You can leverage Azure Storage solutions like disks and file shares to create persistent volumes for applications hosted in containers, then protect that data using Azure Backup. ACR’s geo-replication feature allows you to access your container images from a secondary region, should the primary endpoint go down due to a regional outage. 

In addition, you should have a well-defined DevOps process for redeploying infrastructure to a different region through IAC, and for redeploying applications through a CI/CD process, should there be a downtime due to a cloud outage.

For Azure App Service, multi-region deployment is the best way to minimize application downtime. You can also leverage the backup and restore feature of Azure App Service, which automatically creates a backup of your application configuration, file content, and databases connected to the app. In case of regional outages, applications hosted in Azure App Service will be placed in DR mode. In this mode, you can restore your app contents to a destination app in a different Azure region.

With a mature DevOps practice in place, you can also restore the application by redeploying the code targeting the new destination app. For serverless apps like Azure Functions and microservices-based deployments, it’s best to separate the configuration from the code in cloud-scale deployments. You can use Azure App Configuration to store configuration information that can be accessed during runtime. This approach also helps fast-track the redeployment process of applications during a disaster.

The modern cloud-scale applications deployed in Azure offer multiple options for DR. Be it end-to-end replication using Azure Site Recovery for VMs, leveraging CI/CD pipelines for redeployment, or the more traditional backup/restore approach for services like Azure apps, databases, and containers, the best solution for you will depend on your RPO and RTO. In most cases, you can create an effective solution using Azure-native tools and services and by integrating elements of DR into your application architecture.

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How to create a disaster recovery plan: Is Azure right for you?

The rise of cloud computing, big data, and BYOD in the work environment has made it increasingly challenging to protect your organization’s data.

Small businesses often make the false assumption that their data isn’t as vulnerable to compromise as big corporations, but this is proving to be an incorrect and potentially costly assumption. The National Archives and Records Administration reports that more than 90 percent of companies that experience at least seven days of data center downtime go out of business within a year.

So what’s your plan to ensure that downtime doesn’t collapse your company? You need a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place using a trusted solution like Azure Site Recovery before disaster strikes.

Cost vs. Complexity

When creating your disaster recovery plan, you’ll need to weigh the trade-offs between complexity and cost. What data can you afford to be without? For how long? If you lost some data, would that destroy your business forever? To answer those questions, let’s look at what your plan needs to include.

Five parts of a disaster recovery plan:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO defines how much data you are willing to lose. You can give higher priority to saving your most critical data, while being willing to lose less important data, such as pictures of the Christmas party (which may be better off that way!). Customer records might be top of your list, while marketing data might rank lower.
• Recovery Time Objection (RTO): RTO weighs how long you are willing to be without your data. Depending on your business, you might decide that you can lose up to two hours of business operation. A higher time will create higher costs, so you’ll need to consider your options carefully.
• Personnel: Who should get their data back sooner? Who will support the plan? Do you have a backup person as well as backup technology? Is your plan dependent on human intervention, which may not be possible in all cases?
• Regulatory constraints: Is your business subject to regulatory compliance? How will you make sure you are covered?
• Critical data: Which data is critical to your business? What are the dependencies between different areas of the business?

Find a solution that fits your disaster recovery plan

A cloud solution can help you find a good balance between cost and complexity while fulfilling the requirements you’ve outlined in your plan. With Azure Site Recovery , you can easily create disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure portal that can be as simple or as advanced as your recovery plan demands.

Site Recovery can also help you meet your RTO and RPO requirements since Azure VMs can be replicated between Azure regions as a part of your strategy. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data. Site Recovery provides continuous replication for Azure VMs and VMware VMs, and replication frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V.

Finally, Site Recovery integrates with Azure for simple application network management, including reserving IP addresses, configuring load-balancers, and integrating Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switchovers. Learn more about Microsoft’s complete integrated Azure cloud solution for backup and recovery.

Train and test

Once you have a plan in place you’ll need to train all personnel. You’ll increase your chance of success when upper management endorses the plan and promotes training for all employees. Communicating the plan and even incorporating it in new employee training might be good strategies as well. Assuming everyone knows who is responsible for what can lead to failure.

Too often companies will create a plan, implement it and then stick it in a file. They don’t fully test the plan, or consider multiple scenarios. When a disaster hits, whether its cybercrime, a natural disaster or that rogue sprinkler system, the plan fails. The New York Stock Exchange had a plan before Hurricane Sandy, but they didn’t follow it when disaster hit – instead they closed the stock exchange for two days.

Your resources and business needs will evolve over time because location, personnel, and data changes. Annual training, and testing two to three times a year is the best way to make sure the plan is up-to-date, still supports your current business goals, and everyone is prepared for a short, efficient recovery with as little down time as possible.

Your disaster recovery plan can’t wait  

Nobody likes to think about their business getting hit by a disaster, and hopefully you never will, but facts show that you are likely to experience some level of compromise at some point.

Azure Site Recovery is a trusted and robust solution that can help you recover quickly from disaster. It monitors the state of your protected instances continuously and remotely from Azure. When replicating between two sites that you control, your virtual machines’ data and replication stays on your networks and all communication with Azure is encrypted. You can also select encryption for data at rest.

You can’t guarantee you won’t be affected by cyberattack, natural disaster, technical malfunction and uncontrollable human error, but you can protect your business from costly data loss by investing in a solution that aids in data backup and disaster recovery.

We can help you along the way

We’re here to help with all stages of strategy, planning and implementation. We can discuss your needs and help you explore all your available options, including the advantages of cloud BU and DR.  Don’t wait any longer.

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