Organizations are ditching traditional disaster recovery and backup solutions for restoring their precious data. This is evident through a study conducted by the International Data Corporation. The survey observes that more than 88% of organizations globally favor the cloud as a part of their disaster recovery and backup plans.
Microsoft Azure, a leading global cloud services provider, introduced Azure Site Recovery in 2014. Since the last ten years, organizations globally have used Azure Site Recovery to build their disaster recovery systems and deal with the aftermath of global outages and disasters. One of the main reasons is that it is easy to setup and integrates seamlessly with Azure and non-Azure services without having to make any additional modifications.
Why should a business start their journey on Azure Site Recovery? This blog covers that and more. Let's explore the world of Azure Site Recovery.
How to Create a Comprehensive Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery Strategy? Read the Blog
What Comes with Azure Site Recovery Architecture?
Integrating Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Site Recovery can help organizations in setting up and monitoring replications and ensuring failover and failback from one location to the Azure portal.
Azure VM Replication Capabilities
Organizations can set up a DR plan in scenarios such as: primary DR site to secondary DR site, Azure public MEC to public MEC or from Azure Public MEC to another MEC.
VMware VM Replication Capabilities
Using Azure Site Recovery replication appliance can help in replicating VMware VMs to Azure and ensure better configuration, business resilience, and security.
On-prem VM Replication Capabilities
By preventing the costs and complexities involved in managing a secondary data center, businesses can replicate physical servers and on prem VMs to Azure.
Workload Replication Capabilities
IT teams can replicate production workloads running on a) Azure VMs b) on-prem VMware VMs, and c) Windows/Linux servers
High Data Resilience
By replicating data to Azure, the data gets stored in Azure Storage. Based on the replicated data, Azure VMs are created during a failover event.
RPO and RTO Targets
Set limits for recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). It's ideal to keep the replication frequency for Azure VMs and VMware VMs as low as 30 secs.
Application Consistency
Application consistent screenshot, a command-line tool, enables data protection in databases. They store disk data, in-memory data, and transactions.
Other BCDR Integrations
IT teams can seamlessly integrate BCDR technologies into Site Recovery. For instance, to safeguard the SQL Server Backend of production workloads, SQL Server Always On can be integrated into the Site Recovery.
Azure Automation
Through Azure Automation library, organizations can download production-ready, application-oriented scripts and integrate with Site Recovery.
Network Integrations
For application network management, Azure Traffic Manager can be integrated into Site Recovery to enable network switchover, monitor endpoints, and improve application performance.
Want to know the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery? Read the blog
Get Familiar with the Benefits of Azure Site Recovery
Easy Deployment
To implement Azure Site Recovery, one needs to replicate an Azure VM from the Azure Portal to another Azure region. Not only that, Site Recovery also gets automatically integrated with new and advanced features and functionalities as and when they are released. It helps businesses to prioritize applications that need to be recovered.
Azure Site Recovery services helps in testing the DR plan regularly to ensure compliance, without disturbing the workloads or end-consumers. Added to this, it ensures that applications keep on running during downtime or outage, either from on-prem to Azure or from Azure to another Azure region.
Reduced Infra Costs
Initially, organizations incurred huge costs involved in building and managing datacenters. To avoid these unnecessary expenses as IT teams need to only pay for the compute resources required for running applications on Azure.
Compliance Management
By deploying Site Recovery between two Azure region, organizations can comply with data and industry regulations such as ISO 27001. Ensure the availability of mission-critical applications through Azure's service availability and support. Restore important applications and data swiftly during outages or any system glitches.
How Does the Azure Site Recovery Support Matrix Work?
The Azure Site Recovery Support Matrix is a blueprint of virtual machines, operating systems, servers, applications, databases, and other components that need to be secured and restored using Azure Site Recovery services and tools. The main objective of this matrix is to ensure that organizations build and implement their Disaster Recovery Strategies effectively.
There are three kind of support matrices:
Azure Site Recovery Support Matrix for Azure VM disaster recovery between Azure regions
Outlines the requirements for recovering Azure VMs from one Azure location to another location through leveraging Azure Site Recovery services.
| Deployment | Support |
| PowerShell | Supported |
| Azure Portal | Supported |
| Rest API | Supported |
| CLI | Not Supported |
Azure Site Recovery Support Matrix for VMware, VMs, and Physical Servers to Azure
The Azure site recovery support matrix for VMware covers components and services for enabling the recovery of VMware, VMs, and servers to Azure.
| Deployment | Support |
| DR of VMware VMs | Replicating legacy VMware, VMs to Azure. Leverage PowerShell to deploy this scenario on Azure Portal. |
| DR of Physical Servers | Replicating legacy Windows/Linux physical servers to Azure and later deploy this scenario on Azure Portal. |
Azure Site Recovery Support Matrix for Hyper V VMS to Azure
This matrix encapsulates components for disaster recovery of legacy Hyper-V VMs to Azure.
| Deployment | Support |
| Hyper V using Virtual Machine Manager | For Hyper-V hosts that are managed by Virtual Machine Manager, organizations can enable disaster recovery measures for VMs to Azure and use PowerShell to deploy this scenario in Azure Portal. |
| Hyper V Without using Virtual Machine Manager | For Hyper-V hosts that are not covered by Virtual Machine Manager, IT teams can implement DR measures for VMs to Azure and deploy this scenario to Azure Portal via PowerShell. |
What are the 10 Steps to Create an Azure Disaster Recovery Template? Read the blog
Tools Used in Azure Site Recovery
| Tools | Definition |
| Azure Traffic Manager | A DNS-based traffic load balancer, Azure Traffic Manager enables the distribution of traffic to applications across Azure regions. Along with this, it secures endpoints with high availability and responsiveness. |
| Azure Site Deployment Planner | A command-line tool, Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner helps to gather data from both Hyper V to Azure and VMware to Azure disaster recovery scenarios and use that data to strategize for failover/failback situations. |
| Azure Backup | Azure Backup helps to backup and restore data and applications from on-prem and Azure |
| Azure Storage Replication | Azure Storage Replication keeps several backups of data to protect them from a system failure or any unforeseen disaster. |
Need the right approach to building an Azure Site Deployment Planner? Read the blog
Leverage Azure Recovery Site Services Efficiently with Cloud4C
Till today, one in five organizations doesn't have a disaster recovery or a business continuity plan in place. Implementing a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy can prepare organizations against unpredictable disasters or accidents. Managed cloud services such as Cloud4C come up with the experience and expertise to implement robust disaster recovery strategies and solutions on Azure.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Cloud4C offers Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), a holistic disaster solution suite that helps in replicating and deploying VMs, servers, databases, workloads, and applications on Azure and ensures high availability and minimal data, regardless of the size of the workloads. DRaaS comes with platform, documentation, process management, and tools to ensure restoration on the primary site, post DR. Our dedicated Azure Disaster Recovery experts build customized disaster recovery strategies, considering the criticality of applications, RPO, and RTO. From building, configuring, testing, and maintaining; our professionals take care of the entire disaster recovery and management process.
Are you planning to set up a disaster recovery strategy on Azure? Visit our website or contact us today!
