Azure Backup features and scenarios
Your company's business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan requires a full backup and restore capability for all of your high-risk servers. You're asked to enable and test the backup and restore functionality for these critical Windows and Linux assets.
In this unit, you look at how Azure Backup works, and study some of the supported use cases for Azure Backup.
What is Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is a built-in Azure service that provides secure backup for all Azure-managed data assets. It uses zero-infrastructure solutions to enable self-service backups and restores, with at-scale management at a lower and predictable cost. Azure Backup currently offers specialized backup solutions for Azure and on-premises virtual machines (VMs). Azure Backup also gives workloads like SQL Server or SAP High-performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) running in Azure VMs enterprise-class backup and restore options.
In contrast to traditional backup solutions that can take considerable effort to set up, Azure Backup is easily managed through the Azure portal.
Azure Backup versus Azure Site Recovery
Both Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery aim to make the system more resilient to faults and failures, but they use two different approaches. The primary goal of Backup is to maintain copies of stateful data that allow you to go back in time. Site Recovery, however, replicates the data in almost real time and allows for a failover.
In that sense, if there are issues like network or power outages, you can use availability zones. For a region-wide disaster (such as natural disasters), Site Recovery is used. Backups are used in cases of accidental data loss, data corruption, or ransomware attacks.
Additionally, the choice of a recovery approach depends on the criticality of the application, recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements, and the cost implications.
Why use Azure Backup?
Traditional backup solutions, such as disk and tape, don't offer the highest level of integration with cloud-based solutions. Azure Backup has several benefits over more traditional backup solutions:
Zero-infrastructure backup: Azure Backup eliminates the need to deploy and manage any backup infrastructure or storage. There's no overhead in maintaining backup servers or scaling the storage up or down as the needs vary.
Long-term retention: Meet rigorous compliance and audit needs by retaining backups for many years, after which the built-in lifecycle management capability prunes the recovery points automatically.
Security: Azure Backup provides security to your backup environment, both when your data is in transit and at rest:
Azure role-based access control: Role-based access control allows you to segregate duties within your team and grant only the amount of access to users necessary to do their jobs.
Encryption of backups: Backup data is automatically encrypted using Microsoft-managed keys. Alternatively, you can encrypt your backed-up data using customer-managed keys stored in the Azure Key Vault.
No internet connectivity required: When you use Azure VMs, all the data transfer happens only on the Azure backbone network without needing to access your virtual network. So no access to any IPs or fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) is required.
Soft delete: With soft delete, the backup data is retained for 14 more days even after the deletion of the backup item. This retention protects against accidental deletion or malicious deletion scenarios, allowing the recovery of those backups with no data loss. Azure Backup also provides Enhanced soft delete that enables you to retain a deleted item in the soft deleted state for a longer duration.
Azure Backup also offers the ability to back up VMs encrypted with Azure Disk Encryption.
High availability: Azure Backup offers three types of replication:
Locally redundant storage (LRS): The lowest-cost option with basic protection against server rack and drive failures. We recommend it for noncritical scenarios.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS): The intermediate option has failover capabilities in a secondary region. We recommend it for backup scenarios.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): This option protects against datacenter-level failures by replicating your storage account synchronously across three Azure availability zones. We recommend it for high-availability scenarios.
Centralized monitoring and management: Azure Backup provides built-in monitoring and alerting capabilities in a Recovery Services vault. These capabilities are available without any other management infrastructure.
Azure Backup supported scenarios
Azure Backup supports the following scenarios:
- Azure VMs - Back up Windows or Linux Azure VMs
Azure Backup provides independent and isolated backups to guard against unintended destruction of the data on your VMs. Backups are stored in a Recovery Services vault with built-in management of recovery points. Configuration and scaling are simple, backups are optimized, and you can easily restore as needed. - On-premises - Back up files, folders, and system state using the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent. Or use Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) or Data Protection Manager (DPM) server to protect on-premises VMs (Hyper-V and VMware) and other on-premises workloads.
- Azure Files shares - Azure Files provides snapshot management by Azure Backup.
- SQL Server in Azure VMs and SAP HANA databases in Azure VMs - Azure Backup offers stream-based, specialized solutions to back up SQL Server, or SAP HANA running in Azure VMs. These solutions take workload-aware backups that support different backup types such as full, differential and log, 15-minute RPO, and point-in-time recovery.