At Fall Ignite 2020, we released Backup Center in preview for Azure VMs and Azure Databases for PostgreSQL servers. Backup Center aims to provide a single unified management experience in Azure for enterprises to govern, monitor, operate and analyze backups at scale.
Since the initial preview release, we have continued to enhance Backup Center to help IT admins achieve greater operational efficiencies while managing backups at scale. Below are some of the key updates over the last few months:
Support for additional workloads
Backup Center now includes support for additional workloads (in preview): SQL in Azure VM, SAP HANA in Azure VM and Azure Files.
With this update:
- You can now centrally manage and monitor backups across your entire backup estate, for all Azure-based workloads that are supported by Azure Backup.
- You can gain visibility into resources which do not have backup enabled, across different resource types that are supported by Azure Backup.
- You can filter information by datasource-specific properties allowing you to focus on the database or file share you are protecting, without needing to focus on the vault that it is protected by.
Learn more about the capabilities of Backup Center.
Additional built-in Azure Policies for VM backup governance:
We have now released new Azure for Azure VM backup (in preview) to include additional scenarios based on how your backup teams and resources are organized:
- If you organize applications in dedicated resource groups and want to have them backed up by the same vault, a new Azure policy allows you to automatically manage this action.
- As always, you can continue to use our existing Azure Policy to configure backup, if your organization has a central backup team that manages backups across application teams and requires backups to be created in an existing central Recovery Services vault in the same subscription and location of the VMs to be backed up.
- If your organization follows a practice of tagging VMs, our policies allow you to include/exclude VMs from the scope of a policy assignment, based on . Tags are useful in helping organize Azure resources into a taxonomy, for example, to distinguish production machines vs dev-test machines. With our new Azure Policies, it is now easy to set backup goals based on tags and achieve these goals in an automated manner via Azure Policy.
Learn more about the various built-in Azure Policies offered by Azure Backup.
More updates planned
We are continuously working on adding more capabilities over the next few months. Stay tuned to our product announcements page to learn more or send an email to AskAzureBackupTeam@microsoft.com if you have any questions!
Next steps
- Learn how to govern your backup estate using Backup Center.
- Learn how to monitor and operate your backups using Backup Center.
- Learn how to obtain insights on your backups using Backup Center.
- New to Azure Backup? Sign up for a free Azure trial subscription.
- Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support or browse Azure Backup documentation.
- Follow us on Twitter at @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates.