Azure Site Recovery in 3 Minutes

Having a data/disaster recovery site or plan in place is crucial today, whether for compliance or to ensure if anything does happen, then your business will still be able to operate. Today’s episode of Azure Every Day focuses on Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Site Recovery is Microsoft’s business continuity or data recovery service. With this service, you can move your VMs to the cloud, back them up or go site to site. To utilize this service, you’ll need to coordinate and set up replication between the sites and/or servers.

You have some options of how to do this. You can back up an Azure VM to another Azure VM in a different geo locale, or back up a physical server, VM infrastructure or Hyper-V up to Azure. The physical and VMware are real-time replications, as opposed to Hyper-V, where you can get it down to about a 30-second window.

Azure Site Recovery has many great features, such as:

Application Awareness – It knows what you’re running (i.e. SharePoint, SQL Exchange, Active Directory, etc.) Because of this, it’s able to easily stop in one location and start in another in the event of a disaster.

Region to Region Replication – If you want to take your replication from the East Coast to the West Coast, this is built into the service, so it’s easily done.

Encryption – From a security standpoint, it supports encryption at rest and encryption in transit. This is extremely helpful when you’re backing up from one Azure Virtual Machine to another, or from your local VMware infrastructure to Azure. This will all be encryption in transit, as well as at rest, when it lands in Azure.

Some other key features are the auto failover and auto failback capabilities, as well as continuous replication, so your RTO and RPO are easily met by working on this platform. You can also run automated recovery scenarios, so you can test your disaster plan without any impact to your environment.

Have other questions about Azure Site Recovery or your Azure infrastructure? We’re here to help—from our Azure Every Day Series to our free weekly webinars to our experts on-hand that are ready to talk with you and help you with all things Azure. Click the link below or contact us.