Azure Site Recovery is just like the need for an insurance policy such as health, life, property, and liability, it is essential for every business to assure continuous operation and delivery of products and services to customers.
Technology solutions, transactions and data must be protected from failure and loss to ensure business continuity. The BIA (Business Impact Analysis) is an assessment of risk and impact level from a potential disaster or unforeseen event which identifies the business needs and justifies the investment.
Site recovery enables the re-creation of current environments to their normal state. There is also the everyday possibility of data loss. Accidental or intentional, data could be deleted or corrupted at any time. Backup and recovery ensure data can be restored as well. Smart businesses plan and prepare in advance.
Shouldn’t you buy this assurance? How much does it cost? Is your current solution the best solution and the most cost-effective? Technologies alone, are not the answer. They must be sculpted (like art) into the solution that aligns with your business strategy, governance, and compliance.
What is Azure Site Recovery (ASR)?
Azure Site Recovery is a key component to your organization’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. ASR keeps your data safe, and your apps and workloads online, when planned and unplanned outages occur.
Azure Site Recovery Services contribute to your BCDR strategy:
• Azure Site Recovery Service: helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it.
• Backup Service: from Azure keeps all types of data safe and recoverable.
There are numerous advantages including the elimination of:
• On-premise backup solutions
• Redundant data centers for recovery
• Operational costs for monitoring, maintenance, and support of recovery
• Hardware sitting and waiting to be used
Benefits:
• Pay for storage only and consumption if/when fail over occurs
• Reduce capital expenditures
• IaaS built and maintained via the Azure Cloud
• Works for physical on-premise and/or virtual machines
• Flexible configurations to suit customer preferences
Methods and Considerations
Replication is a method used for disaster recovery. Backup is a method used for data loss or corruption.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the age from which data (records, transactions, files, documents) can be recovered. For example, Azure RPO will allow going back in time from as little as 30 seconds and up to 24 hours.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is how long the recovery will take to return the business to a predefined normal state. When a disaster strikes, this will be the agreed benchmark for recovery. Multiple service levels may exist for different business processes to be restored. For example, immediate for more critical business processes and transactions and up to several hours or days for others.
To ensure an aligned strategy and specific service levels, many questions need to be discussed from the perspective of the business. Every business is different and thus requirements will vary.
Some typical questions include:
• What are your goals (RPO and RTO) for continuity and backup and recovery?
• What are your needs in the case of a disaster (broken down by different business process)?
• What type of storage devices are being used?
• How much storage is currently in use?
• What and where are your current servers, applications, data?
• What data retention is needed? For example, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.
• Should we use one data center or two in Azure?
The Bottom Line
Don’t risk interruption of business operations. Be proactive and prepared in the event of a disaster of any type. Keep it simple and cost-effective with Azure Site Recovery and Backup services. Modern business requires modern solutions. Compare and contrast the return on investment (ROI) for traditional vs. cloud with a capable IT services team.
AKAVEIL Technologies is a Microsoft partner with skilled engineers in the Azure platform. We work directly with each business as a trusted advisor to assess and recommend the best fit solutions now and scalable into the future. Remain competitive and grow your business with AKAVEIL via the cloud.
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Written by Mike Alan