Microsoft Azure Backup Service

Data backup and recovery from the Microsoft Azure cloud are made easy, secure, and affordable with the help of the Azure Backup service.

Azure Backup is a one-click backup solution that is affordable, secure, and scalable based on your backup storage requirements. It is simple to set backup policies and safeguard a variety of enterprise workloads using the unified administration interface, including Azure Virtual Machines, SQL and SAP databases, and Azure file shares.

A Centralized Backup Solution and Service That Aids in Ransomware Defense

Azure Backup is a one-click backup solution that is affordable, secure, and scalable based on your backup storage requirements. It is simple to set backup policies and safeguard a variety of enterprise workloads using the unified administration interface, including Azure Virtual Machines, SQL and SAP databases, and Azure file shares.

Features Of Azure Backup Service

Centralized Management

Using Backup Center, you can monitor, manage, regulate, and optimize data protection at scale in a single and consistent way.

Application Consistency

In Linux, pre-and post-processing scripts are used to back up and restore virtual machine data with application consistency using Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows.

Multiple-Workload Support

SQL Server, SAP HANA, on-premises servers, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Files, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL are all backed up.

Durable Storage Options

Back up files locally, geographically, and in zone-redundant storage (LRS, GRS, etc.). (ZRS).

What Can I Back Up?

• On-site: Take a backup of your files, directories, and system state using the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent. You can also utilize the DPM or Azure Backup Server (MABS) agent to protect on-premises VMs (Hyper-V and VMware) and other on-premises workloads.
• Azure VMs —  Use the MARS agent to backup files, folders, and system state or backup complete Windows/Linux VMs (using backup extensions).
• Azure Managed Disks: Back up your Azure Managed Disks.
• Shares of Azure Files can be backed up to a storage account.
• Back up SQL Server databases that are installed on Azure VMs.
• Back up any SAP HANA databases that are currently running on Azure VMs.
• Back up Azure PostgreSQL databases and keep the backups for up to ten years using Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers.
• Azure Blobs —  Overview of operational backup for Azure Blobs.

How Can I Utilize Azure Backup?

Azure Backup delivers these key benefits:

Offload On-Premises Backup

• You can easily back up your on-premises resources to the cloud with Azure Backup. Avoid deploying complicated on-premises backup systems by getting short- and long-term backups instead.

Back-Up Azure IaaS VMs 

• To protect against inadvertent data loss, Azure Backup offers independent and segregated backups. Backups are kept in a Recovery Services vault with integrated recovery point management. Backups are streamlined, configuration and scalability are straightforward, and you can easily restore when necessary.

Scale Easily 

• Azure Backup provides high availability with minimal maintenance or monitoring requirements by utilizing the Azure cloud's inherent power and limitless scale.

Get Unlimited Data Transfer

• The quantity of data that may be sent in or out of Azure Backup is unrestricted, and there are no fees associated with data transfers.
• Data transported from a Recovery Services vault during a restore procedure is referred to as outbound data.
• There is a fee for inbound data if you take an offline initial backup and use the Azure Import/Export service to import big amounts of data. Study more.

Keep Data Secure 

• Solutions for safeguarding data both in transit and at rest are offered by Azure Backup.

Centralized Monitoring and Management

• In a Recovery Services vault, Azure Backup offers built-in monitoring and alerting features. There is no need for additional management infrastructure to use these functionalities. Azure Monitor can be used to expand the scope of your reporting and monitoring.

Get App-Consistent Backups 

• A recovery point that is application-consistent has all the data necessary to restore the backup copy. Application-consistent backups are offered by Azure Backup, ensuring that no extra fixes are necessary in order to restore the data. You can restore to a running state more quickly by restoring application-consistent data, which shortens the restoration time.

Retain Short and Long-Term Data

• For both short- and long-term data retention, Recovery Services vaults is an option.

Automatic Storage Management 

• Heterogeneous storage is frequently needed in hybrid systems, both on-premises and in the cloud. There are no fees associated with using on-premises storage with Azure Backup. Azure Backup is a pay-per-use business model and uses automatic allocation and management of backup storage. You only pay for the storage that you really use. Study up on pricing. 

Multiple Storage Options 

Azure Backup offers three types of replications to keep your storage/data highly available.

1. In a storage scale unit in a data center, locally redundant storage (LRS) duplicates your data three times (it makes three copies of it). The data are present in the same region in all of its copies. A cheap method for safeguarding your data against local hardware failures is LRS.
2. Replication using GRS, or geo-redundant storage, is the default and suggested configuration. Your data is replicated by GRS to a different region (hundreds of miles away from the primary location of the source data). GRS is more expensive than LRS, but it offers greater data durability, even in the event of a regional outage.
3. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS), which replicates your data in availability zones, ensures data residency and resilience in the same region. ZRS never goes offline. Therefore, you can back up your key workloads in ZRS that require data residency and cannot experience any downtime.

How Does Azure Backup Defend Against Ransomware?

By putting preventive steps in place and offering solutions that shield your business from all the steps attackers take to access your systems, Azure Backup helps you safeguard your vital business systems and backup data from a ransomware assault. When your data is in transit or at rest, it secures your backup environment. 

Manage Backup Data at Scale

• With h Backup center, you can manage and keep an eye on your entire backup estate from a single console.
• Utilize Azure Policy to enforce backups at scale and maintain compliance.
• Using the historical information and trends displayed in Backup reports, audit and evaluate backup data.
• Automation of backup policies and security setups can be achieved via APIs, PowerShell, and Azure CLI.
• Data from cloud backups can be efficiently and securely exported to your own monitoring systems.

Protect Your Backups

• Role-based access control can be used to provide users with fine-grained access for particular backup activities (RBAC).
• By keeping backups for 14 days after a deletion with soft delete, you can avoid unintentional data loss.
• Enable multiple-user authentication as an additional layer of authorization for crucial processes to safeguard data from ransomware assaults.
• Utilizing 256-bit AES encryption with customer-managed keys, you have total control over how to safeguard and access your data.
• Enable the safe transfer of backups from private endpoints to Azure Backup storage.
• With zone- and geo-redundant storage and the flexibility to restore backups from a matched region at any time, availability is ensured.

Cut Expenses

• Get rid of the unnecessary expenses for additional backup infrastructure and management and scalability costs for storage.
• Right-size your backup storage by optimizing backup costs with trends and insights from backup reports.
• For significant cost savings in storage and compliance with your long-term retention requirements, send recovery points to the archive tier.
• To personalize your backup solution and cut storage expenses, selectively back up the discs inside an Azure virtual machine.
• Utilize the Backup pricing estimator to calculate specific expenses.

Protect a Diverse Set of Workloads

• From one spot, you can easily back up all of your infrastructure, databases, and storage workloads.
• Obtain application-consistent snapshots of Windows and Linux-based Azure Virtual Machines.
• Protect essential platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) databases, including Azure Database for PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and SAP HANA, in Azure Virtual Machines.
• Create snapshots of Azure Disks that are crash-consistent but agentless.
• Using Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage prevents data loss.