Mistakes and failures can happen to everything in life. Due to different factors from costs to lack of expertise, companies sometimes forget the importance of fault tolerance and business continuity.
Companies without a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy can face much higher costs if an occurrence of failures leads to data loss, business down and essentially, revenue loss.
In our experiences, BCDR can be implemented to different extents with the support of different technologies. However, building a complete and effective disaster recovery plan (DRP) is complicated and costly. Then DRaaS comes in, disaster recovery as a service can be a hero for many businesses. In this article, I would like to introduce Azure Disaster Site Recovery service and its benefits.
What is Microsoft Azure Site Recovery?
Azure’s built-in disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) contributes to your BCDR plan by providing two main services:
● Site Recovery service: during an outage, it ensures business apps and workload running. With frequent replications and fail-over during primary site disruption, disaster damage is minimized and your business is up and running,
● Backup Service: Azure rich resources ensures your data safe and importantly recoverable.
With the increasing popularity and adoption of cloud, managing your own data centers for disaster recovery has become too costly for many businesses. DRaaS offers the perfect option to meet the much-needed level of security and business continuity for your business.
Why do we choose Microsoft Azure Site Recovery?
● Cost-effectiveness: It is undeniable that Azure’s infrastructure is one of the best. You have access to various data centers in different regions without the huge costs of acquiring and maintaining these infrastructures on your own. The whole cost of planning, deploying, monitoring and maintaining a secondary site is also greatly reduced. Furthermore, Microsoft promises to charge only the computing resources of your applications in Azure, hence, no extra costs of infrastructure.
A huge benefit of Azure Site Recovery is that you do not have to invest in a huge IT team to run it. Your business is always ready to tackle, any and your staff is not under pressure to go through all back-end jobs to get the business up and running again. A minimal downtime.
● Easy integration/ migration/ replication: far from the time of Microsoft being picky and only support MS products. Now Azure supports many replication scenarios, from Azure to Azure and from Hyper-V, VMWare, Window, Linux to Azure. You can replicate not just your VMs but also your physical servers.
You can also integrate new Azure Site Recovery with your existing different BCDR technologies. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, with native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn, to manage the failover of availability groups. Some other popular services are Oracle Data Guard, SAP, DNS, Exchange.
● Simplicity: Azure Site Recovery service is simple. It doesn’t require a huge learning curve. You can easily deploy and manage in the Azure portal.
● Planned and unplanned failover: after creating a BCDR strategy, you need to ensure that it works the way you want and meet your business requirement. You can perform planned fail-over to test out different scenarios without harming your business. This offers tremendous flexibility for your company.
● Customization: you can design your fail-over according to groups and sequence. You can create new groups, add virtual machines to a specific group and specify group recovery order. This also enhances testing flexibility as well. You can test out different groups and sequences up to your business scenarios.
Recovery plans can also use custom scripts and manual actions.
● Automation replication & efficiency: You might have a disaster recovery plan but is it really good? Azure Site Discovery helps you to minimize damages and downtime with two leading crucial parameters, recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
○ RPO is your tolerance threshold of data loss. Some businesses might accept a data loss of 20 hours, whereas, this threshold might be unacceptable for other companies. With automated replication, Azure can have a frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V.
○ RTO is real time. How much downtime can your business endure after business disruption starts?
You cannot deny the inevitable advantages of a top company like Microsoft. Using Microsoft Azure also ensures you will meet security requirements including ISO 27001 and ISO 27018.
Overall, a well-prepared DR is crucial to business, along with I-Net Dynamics’ IT experts and timely support, Microsoft Azure is a top service with simplicity and flexibility that will give you peace of mind.
