Expanding Azure Backup for the Cloud-Native Ecosystem
In today's dynamic digital landscape, with compliance mandates tightening and cyber threats evolving, cloud administrators face the critical task of ensuring applications and data remain protected, compliant, and resilient.
At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Vaulted Backup support in Azure Backup for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This release equips organizations with robust solution designed to meet compliance requirements, strengthen operational resilience, and protect cloud-native applications. With this expansion, Azure Backup empowers administrators to manage data protection and recovery with greater ease, offering up to 10 years of data retention to meet compliance standards, alongside integrated cyber resilience features to safeguard backup data against evolving threats. In addition, customers now recover their applications during a regional disaster using backups.
What This Means for Azure Customers
With Azure Backup’s GA support for Vaulted backups of AKS clusters, customers can confidently address compliance, secure disaster recovery across regions, and enhance their data protection framework:
- Regulatory Compliance: Effortlessly meet retention mandates across global compliance frameworks with long-term retention (LTR) support for up to 10 years.
- Enhanced Security and Cyber Resilience: Immutable vaults and role-based access control safeguard backup data from ransomware and unauthorized access.
- Disaster Recovery Across Regions: Cross-Region Restore provides critical regional failover capabilities, supporting business continuity and meeting disaster recovery mandates.
Key Highlights of the GA Release
- Compliance Support for Cloud-Native Applications
- Azure Backup enables backup retention for up to 10 years for AKS clusters, helping customer to align with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA that require long-term, secure data storage. Even for stateless AKS clusters, Azure Backup now enables fulfilling compliance requirements for scenarios require to retain application code for cyber resiliency.
- Achieve Data Integrity with Immutable Vaults
- Azure Backup’s immutability at the management level prevents backups from being deleted or altered—offering critical protection against insider threats and accidental deletions. With backups secured against malicious actors enhances data integrity and resilience in today’s complex threat landscape.
- Enhanced Cyber Resilience
- To address the increasing sophistication of cyber threats, Azure Backup includes:
- Offsite Vaulted Storage: Backups stored outside of the customer’s tenant, ensuring safety even if a tenant is compromised, enabling secure application recovery.
- Customer-Managed Key (CMK) Encryption: Protects backup data using customer-managed keys.
- Soft Delete: Retains deleted backups temporarily, allowing recovery from accidental or malicious deletion.
- User Identity Support: Enforces role-based access, securing backup management.
- Scalable Backup Management
- Leverage the unified Azure Business Continuity Center for a comprehensive view and streamlined management of your AKS clusters across your tenant. This single-pane solution lets you identify protectable and protected items, perform backup-related operations, and monitor and govern backups at scale, simplifying compliance and operational resilience across your organization.
- Regional Disaster Recovery for AKS
- Azure Backup’s Cross-Region Restore (CRR) feature enables disaster recovery for both stateful and stateless applications in an Azure paired region, maintaining a 24-hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and securing applications against disaster.
Why This Matters for Azure Customers
With the new support for AKS, Azure Backup simplifies compliance, bolsters security, and enhances operational resilience across cloud-native environments.
Visit the documentation and activate Azure Backup for your AKS clusters, and enable compliance with resilient, cloud-native data protection today.
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