Technology has radically altered the way we do business. Paper has been replaced with pixels; filing cabinets with server rooms. With so much of your organization’s data now stored digitally, new strategies are needed to protect it.
Whether it’s a natural disaster, a power surge, or a cyber attack, terabytes of information can disappear in the blink of an eye.
In fact, a downtime event can cost your business thousands of dollars per minute; by some estimates, this means as much as $500,000 per hour. But you can minimize losses by regularly backing up mission-critical data. In this article, we explore the fundamental concepts behind a successful Microsoft Azure backup strategy.
First released in 2010, Microsoft Azure is a leading public cloud computing platform hosted on Microsoft data centers. It boasts a comprehensive feature set with over 200 cloud-based services and products. Broadly speaking, this includes:
Microsoft Azure empowers organizations to execute a diverse range of tasks, from compute and storage to analytics and networking. With so much at stake, it’s little wonder that Azure data should be protected with a comprehensive backup strategy.
Backup strategies are fundamental to any serious disaster recovery plan (DRP). The goal is to create copies of all your mission-critical business data; these redundancies are then stored in separate locations, acting as a failsafe in the wake of a primary data failure.
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What makes Windows Azure backups so appealing is that it requires no additional infrastructure, making it affordable, secure, and scalable. Best of all, your backups are always accessible when you need them for recovery. Let’s look at some of Backup’s most important features.
There are three main storage options for replicated data. Each storage option has its own specific use case. You can learn more about their applications here.
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Access control features let you govern authorization privileges at a user-level. This can be managed through your Azure Recovery Services Vault (ARSV), which is accessible through the Backup Center, Azure portal, and other Microsoft dashboards.
While retention and schedule are intimately related, they represent distinct concepts. Retention refers to the duration of time in which backed-up data will be saved; schedule refers to the frequency in which the data is backed up. Your Azure Backup storage will be influenced by both factors.
In terms of retention, the Azure Backup retention policy outlines three options. The policy you choose should reflect your organizational needs and will vary depending on the type of backup data in question. These policies include:
Depending on the data type, you’ll often find yourself combining policies. For instance, since a scheduled Azure Backup policy allows for just a single daily backup, you can use on-demand backup with a custom retention period to make additional or granular backups. This could be the case if you want to run multiple IaaS VM backups per day or if you are about to undertake a major change to your system and want a pre-change backup.
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When it comes to backup jobs, it’s important to understand the relationship between snapshots and recovery points. Like a camera, a snapshot “takes a photo” of a virtual machine’s current state. This snapshot then acts as a recovery point for restore procedures.
In the first phase, a snapshot is stored in what’s called the Snapshot tier. A recovery from this tier is referred to as Instant Restore because it offers much faster restore capabilities than Vault tier backup storage. Nevertheless, in the second phase, the snapshot is passed to the Vault tier which adheres to stricter security protocols.
Now that we understand how to backup Azure data, let’s touch on what Azure data we want to back-up. The nature of Azure’s far-reaching features means that abundant data and data types are being generated across many different sources, some of which include:
As a result, your backup strategy will vary depending on the complexity of the data in question. Thankfully, Azure supports all of it—from your run-of-the-mill file to a highly sophisticated workload.
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No two DRPs are identical. Every organization must decide what is acceptable in terms of backup schedule, restore time frames, and downtime tolerance. As much as possible, your expectations should guide (and align with) your backup strategy. This will vary from workload to workload, depending on its complexity and centrality to your primary operations.
In concrete terms, your organization must determine how long it can tolerate an absence of mission-critical data. This figure is known as the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). You should also assess the maximum length of time you can invest in restoring operations, called Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
As much as we’d like to get back up-and-running instantaneously, restoration is naturally hindered by factors such as data transfer and queue times. Disasters and downtime aside, it’s worth noting that backups themselves can also take time for several reasons. This includes:
Despite the fact that Azure Backup has many methods of streamlining these processes, you should always schedule your backup frequency to account for inherent delays. Understanding these factors, and calculating their effect, is key to assessing the viability of your DRP.
You can’t always prevent disaster, but you can certainly prepare for it. Your organization’s ability to recover from a primary data failure can literally mean the difference between business-as-usual and sayonara.
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