Azure Resiliency: Proactive Continuity with Agentic Experiences and Frontier Innovation

molina_sharma

Microsoft

Nov 18, 2025

Introduction

In today’s digital-first world, even brief downtime can disrupt revenue, reputation, and operations. Azure’s new resiliency capabilities empower organizations to anticipate and withstand disruptions—embedding continuity into every layer of their business.

At Microsoft Ignite, we’re unveiling a new era of resiliency in Azure, powered by agentic experiences. The new Azure Copilot resiliency agent brings AI-driven workflows that proactively detect vulnerabilities, automate backups, and integrate cyber recovery for ransomware protection. IT teams can instantly assess risks and deploy solutions across infrastructure, data, and cyber recovery—making resiliency a living capability, not just a checklist.

The Evolution from Azure Business Continuity Center to Resiliency in Azure

Microsoft is excited to announce that the Azure Business Continuity Center (ABCC) is evolving into resiliency capabilities in Azure. This evolution expands its scope from traditional backup and disaster recovery to a holistic resiliency framework. This new experience is delivered directly in the Azure Portal, providing integrated dashboards, actionable recommendations, and one-click access to remediation—so teams can manage resiliency where they already operate. Learn more about this: aka.ms/Ignite2025/Resiliencyblog. To see the new experience, visit the Azure Portal.

The Three Pillars of Resiliency

Azure’s resiliency strategy is anchored in three foundational pillars, each designed to address a distinct dimension of operational continuity:

Infrastructure Resiliency: Built-in redundancy and zonal/regional management keep workloads running during disruptions. The resiliency agent in Azure Copilot automates posture checks, risk detection, and remediation.
Data Resiliency: Automated backup and disaster recovery meet RPO/RTO and compliance needs across Azure, on-premises, and hybrid.
Cyber Recovery: Isolated recovery vaults, immutable backups, and AI-driven insights defend against ransomware and enable rapid restoration.

With these foundational pillars in place, organizations can adopt a lifecycle approach to resiliency—ensuring continuity from day one and adapting as their needs evolve.

The Lifecycle Approach: Start Resilient, Get Resilient, Stay Resilient

While the pillars define what resiliency protects, the lifecycle stages in resiliency journey define how organizations implement and sustain it over time. For the full framework, see the prior blog; below we focus on what’s new and practical.

The resiliency agent in Azure Copilot empowers organizations to embed resiliency at every stage of their cloud journey—making proactive continuity achievable from day one and sustainable over time.

Start Resilient: With the new resiliency agent, teams can “Start Resilient” by leveraging guided experiences and automated posture assessments that help design resilient workloads before deployment. The agent surfaces architecture gaps, validates readiness, and recommends best practices—ensuring resiliency is built in from the outset, not bolted on later.

Get Resilient: As organizations scale, the resiliency agent enables them to “Get Resilient” by providing estate-wide visibility, automated risk assessments, and configuration recommendations. AI-driven insights help identify blind spots, remediate risks, and accelerate the adoption of resilient-by-default architectures—so resiliency is actively achieved across all workloads, not just planned.

Stay Resilient: To “Stay Resilient,” the resiliency agent delivers continuous validation, monitoring, and improvement. Automated failure simulations, real-time monitoring, and attestation reporting allow teams to proactively test recovery workflows and ensure readiness for evolving threats. One-click failover and ongoing posture checks help sustain compliance and operational continuity, making resiliency a living capability that adapts as your business and technology landscape changes

Best Practices for Proactive Continuity in Resiliency

To enable proactive continuity, organizations should:

Architect for high availability across multiple availability zones and regions (prioritize Tier-0/1 workloads).
Automate recovery with Azure Site Recovery and failover playbooks for orchestrated, rapid restoration.
Leverage integrated zonal resiliency experiences to uncover blind spots and receive tailored recommendations.
Continuously validate using Chaos Studio to simulate outages and test recovery workflows.
Monitor SLAs, RPO/RTO, and posture metrics with Azure Monitor and Policy; iterate for ongoing improvement.
Use the Azure Copilot resiliency agent for AI-driven posture assessments, remediation scripts, and cost analysis to streamline operations.

Conclusion & Next Steps

Resiliency capabilities in Azure unifies infrastructure, data, and cyber recovery while guiding organizations to start, get, and stay resilient. Teams adopting these capabilities see faster posture improvements, less manual effort, and continuous operational continuity.

This marks a fundamental shift—from reactive recovery to proactive continuity. By embedding resiliency as a living capability, Azure empowers organizations to anticipate, withstand, and recover from disruptions, adapting to new threats and evolving business needs.

Organizations adopting Resiliency in Azure see measurable impact:

Accelerated posture improvement with AI-driven insights and actionable recommendations.
Less manual effort through automation and integrated recovery workflows.
Continuous operational continuity via ongoing validation and monitoring

Ready to take the next step? Explore these resources and sessions: