Azure Backup vs. Azure Site Recovery: Key Differences Explained
When it comes to safeguarding your data and ensuring business continuity, Microsoft Azure offers two powerful solutions: Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery (ASR). Although both services are critical components of a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy, they serve distinct purposes. Based on my experience working with the hundreds of Customers sometimes they are not sure to use which services or their use cases. In some cases, Customers need both services to meet their business requirements. Here's a breakdown of their key differences: Purpose and Functionality Azure Backup: This service focuses on data backup and restoration. It provides a simple, secure, and reliable way to back up files, folders, applications, and virtual machines (VMs) to Azure. Azure Backup protects against data loss due to accidental deletion, ransomware attacks, or corruption. Azure Site Recovery (ASR): ASR is designed for disaster recovery and business continuity. It replicates workloads running on physical or virtual machines to a secondary location to ensure seamless failover during a disaster. Use Case: Azure Backup is ideal for long-term data retention, whereas ASR is critical for minimizing downtime and ensuring workload availability during outages. Core Capabilities Azure Backup: Creates backups for Azure VMs, On-prem VMs, Azure Managed Disks, Azure file shares, SQL server in Azure VMs, SAP HANA databases in Azure VMs, Azure Blobs, Azure Kubernetes services and Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers. Supports both on-premises and cloud-based resources. Provides long-term retention and lifecycle management for backups. Offers encryption at rest and in transit to secure data. Azure Site Recovery: Replicate Azure VMs, On-premises VMs and VMWare VMs. Continuous replication of workloads for low recovery point objectives (RPOs). Orchestrated failover and failback capabilities. Multi-region disaster recovery for VMs and physical servers. Integration with BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) plans. Key Differentiator: Azure Backup is about data recovery, while ASR is about workload continuity. Recovery Objectives Azure Backup: Focuses on the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for restoring individual files or entire systems. RPO depends on the backup schedule (e.g., daily or hourly backups). Azure Site Recovery: Aims to minimize downtime by ensuring applications and workloads are quickly available in a secondary location during an outage. It delivers lower RTO and RPO compared to backup solutions. Data Recovery vs. Workload Recovery Azure Backup: Restores data at a granular level (e.g., files, folders, or entire systems). Azure Site Recovery: Ensures entire workloads, including infrastructure and applications, are replicated and can be failed over to another location. Cost Azure Backup: Costs are primarily based on the size of backed-up data and the number of recovery points stored in the Recovery Services Vault. Azure Site Recovery: Pricing is driven by the number of instances being replicated and the storage consumed by replicated data. Comparison: Azure Backup is generally more cost-effective for data protection, whereas ASR justifies its higher cost by providing enterprise-grade disaster recovery capabilities. Final Thoughts Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are complementary solutions that address different aspects of data protection and disaster recovery. For long-term data retention and restoration, Azure Backup is the go-to solution. For mission-critical applications requiring business continuity during disruptions, Azure Site Recovery ensures workloads remain operational with minimal downtime. A robust IT strategy often involves leveraging both services to cover the spectrum of data protection and recovery needs, ensuring business resilience no matter the scenario.How to create a VPN between Azure and AWS using only managed solutions
What if you can establish a connection between Azure and AWS using only managed solutions instead to have to use virtual machines?This is exactly what we'll be covering on this article connecting AWS Virtual Private Gateway with the Azure VPN Gateway directly without worry to manage IaaS resources like virtual machines.Azure VPN Gateway vs. ExpressRoute - Quick comparison
TL;DR. VPN Gateway provides secured connectivity between on-premises networks or clients to Azure services inside virtual networks. The data is encrypted through a private IPsec tunnel over the public internet. The configuration is easy. Price is a combination between he chosen VPN Gateway SKU and the outbound data transfer. It's usually used for small to medium scale production workloads for cloud services and virtual machines. ExpressRoute lets you extend your on-premises networks into the Microsoft clouds (Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365) over a private dedicated connection with the help of a connectivity provider. The data is not encrypted, but does not go over the public Internet. Configuration is more complicated and involves the third party provider as well. The price is significantly higher than the VPN Gateway, and it is a combination of the Gateway type and the outbound data transfer. It's mostly used if really needed, for enterprise-class and mission critical workloads, Backup, Big Data, Azure as a DR site etc.
Using Azure Automation to perform Azure Site Recovery post failover tasks in virtual machines
This article shows how to effectively perform post failover tasks using an Azure Automation Account and a PowerShell runbook. While this article focuses on enabling encryption at host in failed over Azure VMs, a similar approach can be used for other post failover actions.Making Searching and Curating Data Assets in Microsoft Purview easier.
Introduction. Currently, IT infrastructure stores and maintains data assets, even though IT doesn't own or use the data. There's a disconnect between how data needs to be discovered and maintained within the business, and the teams that maintain it. Without standardized procedures for data governance, data handling often relies on manual processes, leading to inefficiencies, data loss, insufficient data protection and higher operational costs. Microsoft Purview is designed to help enterprises get the most value from their existing information assets. The catalog makes data sources easily discoverable and understandable by the users who manage the data. With Purview, organizations can gain insights into data lineage, data usage, and data connections, helping them to comply with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and others. Microsoft Purview provides a cloud-based service into which you can register data sources. During registration, the data remains in its existing location, but a copy of its metadata is added to Microsoft Purview, along with a reference to the data source location. After you register a data source, you can scan it and enrich its metadata. Discovering and understanding data sources and their use is the primary purpose of registering the sources. In this article, we describe smart features that allow you to search previously scanned data assets using natural language queries, along with automated metadata enrichment for curating these assets.
