Developing a business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) plan is critical when creating a proactive strategy for your organization’s infrastructure. Anything can happen that could cause an outage in the availability of your products and services. That loss of time can push a consumer to a competitor’s site. This is where Azure Site Recovery comes in.
BCDRs do many things when properly implemented. They mitigate risk, make recovery smoother after a disaster, reduce legal culpability, and create protection for your brand. Azure Site Recovery aids in the process of creating your BCDR plan.
What makes a good disaster recovery plan
Creating BCDR strategies vary depending on how many steps it’s divided into, but ultimately, there are four key steps in the process:
- Perform an impact analysis
- Identify recovery strategies
- Plan its development
- Test and create exercises for the recovery strategies discovered
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Microsoft Azure Site Recovery
As a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, Azure Site Recovery “offers ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness, and dependability” for your business. There’s simplicity in having a single access point for all things replicated, failovers, and failbacks.
One of its primary functions is to “replicate workloads running on physical and virtual machines from a primary location to a secondary one” without completely disrupting processes. It lets you bounce back to the primary location seamlessly once it’s back up and running.
There is a caveat, though. It can only manage replications for Azure VMs replicating between Azure regions, on-premise VMs, Azure Stack VMs, physical servers, and workloads.
Because Site Recovery is a fully integrated cloud solution, automatic patching and updates happen continually. So, customers receive the latest and greatest features as they are released. Azure Site Recovery has a ton of impactful features on the market today. Here are a few of them.
Data Resilience
Security is important. Know that when you need to replicate your data to Azure, it is not intercepted. Your data is protected in virtual machines and physical servers. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created, based on the replicated data.
Network Integrations
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.
Other features available with Azure Site Recovery are:
- App consistency over failovers
- Testing without disruption
- Recovery time objectives and recovery point objective targets
- BCDR integrations
- Azure automation integrations
- Backup services
Azure Backup does just that. It backs up your data and stores it on the Azure cloud for easy recovery during downtime or outages. With this feature, your on-premise data, no matter the size, can be stored on the Azure cloud. It can retain short-term and long-term data, as needed.
There are multiple storage options available, whether utilizing the locally redundant storage (LRS) or geo-redundant storage (GRS) to house your replications. This feature can also manage hybrid environments, so if you have a mixture of on-premise and cloud data, Azure Backup handles both via a pay-as-you-use model. Keep your data on-premise and pay only for the cloud storage you need.
When it comes to security, Site Recovery has applicable measures working to quell any fears from a business standpoint. One measure is encryption-in-transit, or the ability to It depends on the type of secondary site the data is pushed to. We mentioned earlier that Azure cannot read your data on VMs and physical servers. Businesses can also make sure they remain in compliance with Site Recovery by testing before disasters strike. So if privacy is a top concern, as it should be, those are some benefits of this solution.
Azure Site Recovery is a competitive tool in the DRaaS space. Its simplicity in deployment, management, noticeable reduction in downtime, and low costs are all factors that make it one of the best products on the market today. In the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, Gartner considers Microsoft a leader.
In Conclusion
As reported by Gartner, a strength of the Azure Site Recovery tool is that “Microsoft has high success rates and speed of failover, with over 90% of ASR failovers completed in 10 minutes and 99.9% completed within 30 minutes. Integrations with Azure Traffic Manager can minimize downtime for public-facing services by redirecting traffic from on-premises to ASR upon failover.”
If this solution looks like a great fit for your business, learn how Sherweb help you with your BCDR strategy.
