Month: November 2016

Data is an essential component of every business and keeping them safe is even more important. One of the strategies of keeping your data safe is backing them up. Microsoft Azure offers a solution named Azure Backup – a scalable solution with zero capital investment and minimal operational expense.  With Azure Backup, you can safeguard your data in any environment – physical, hybrid or cloud.

Azure Backup helps you to protect your critical applications including SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, files and folders, Windows Servers, Windows Clients, and Azure IaaS VMs, no matter they are on servers, clients or in the cloud so as to avoid costly business interruptions or to meet compliance requirements. Conventionally, tapes and disks were used as a backup alternative but as business grows, its data grows exponentially. Azure Backup is a compelling alternative to tapes and disks, is cost effective, takes minimal recovery times and upto 99 years of data retention.
Azure Backup uses a pay-as-you-use model in which you pay only for the storage that you consume. With Azure Backup, you have options to store your data as a Locally Redundant or Geo-replication, depending upon your needs and budget. It allows data encryption too, with a unique encryption key only for you, to ensure that your data is transmitted and stored securely in the cloud. Plus, you can recover just what you need with the minimum time loss, allowing you to quickly recover to the original state.

Automated. Reliable. Secure. Encrypted.

• Retain: Retain your Data in Azure for up to 99 years
• Schedule: You can specify daily, weekly, monthly and yearly policies of back up
• Throttle: Network throttling can be configured so that optimal bandwidth usage happens during off-peak time
• Compress: Data is compressed on the client side so there is less bandwidth consumption and less storage consumed
• Secure: Data is encrypted in your datacentre and stored encrypted in Azure – the encryption key is stored and managed locally
• Incremental: After the initial seeding, backups are incremental, ensuring that resources such as storage and bandwidth are efficiently used
• Reliable: 3 copies of the data are stored to a single datacentre location and optionally at an additional, remote datacentre
• Report and Monitor: Centralized monitoring and reporting across on premises and Azure
• Protection Anywhere: protects workloads running in Azure, in VMs, or on physical servers

Now you know that, Microsoft Azure is an innately flexible cloud that can back up your data in any language, on any OS, and from any location.
If you need help, please feel free to reach us.

Businesses are unpredictable. You never know what will come up next unless you have not planned for the future. Businesses face various types of downtimes which may or may not be controlled. Every business needs such a strategy which ensures that their business data is safe during downtimes and can be recovered to regular working conditions as soon as possible.
Microsoft Azure helps you run your business uninterrupted even in the times of disaster with its solution – Site Recovery. Site Recovery contributes to your Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy by orchestrating replication of on-premises virtual machines and physical servers. You replicate servers and VMs from your primary on-premises data centre to the cloud (Azure), or to a secondary data centre. All this is done in matter of seconds!

Azure’s Site Recovery can help your business in the following ways:

• Fail over and recover to the primary data centre within seconds, without losing your data and time
• A no-brainer for Windows and System Center-centric operations as it integrates tightly with System Center
• Provides flexible replication of any workload from various VMs
• No mandatory secondary data centre as you can replicate the workloads on Azure
• Perform easy replication testing
• Integrates with Microsoft applications, including SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics, SQL Server and Active Directory
• Customize Replication Solutions

Did you know? Gartner has positioned Microsoft in the Leader quadrant in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), citing service feature innovation, cost-effectiveness and simplicity of the provider portal GUI as strengths meriting the Leader status.
Azure offers you two different deployment models – Azure Resource Manager model and Classic Services Management model. Site Recovery can be deployed in both the portals of Azure – the Classic portal in which you can support Site Recovery with the classic services management model and the Azure portal in which you can support the classic model, or Resource Manager Deployments.
Whether your apps are Windows or Linux-based, running on physical servers, VMware or Hyper-V, you can use Site Recovery to orchestrate replication, perform disaster recovery testing, and run failovers and failback.
If you need help, please feel free to reach us.