General Availability: Vaulted backup for Azure Files - Boost your data security and compliance
We are thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Vaulted Backup support in Azure Backup for Azure files - Standard tier to help seamlessly protect your data and applications hosted on Azure file share. With this release, you can now leverage vaulted backup integration to protect Standard SMB file shares. Azure Backup vaulted support for Azure file share provides enhanced data protection with the ability to configure snapshot and vaulted backup in a single policy to a secure backup location(Recovery Services vault) and support regional recovery. Vaulted backup provides advanced protection capabilities like ransomware protection, ability to restore even when file share is deleted which are missing with snapshot only backup. Vaulted backup solution seamlessly integrates with Azure File sync allowing File sync customers to protect data tiered to the cloud long-term in a cost-effective manner. In this blog post let’s explore how Azure Backup can enable robust data protection solution for businesses migrating and hosting applications on Azure file share. Security: Protection against Ransomware Ransomware or malware attack, continues to be a major threat to organizations worldwide, often leaving businesses at the mercy of cybercriminals demanding hefty ransom payments in exchange for access to their encrypted data. Vaulted backups provide a vital line of defense, ensuring that organizations can recover their data without giving in to ransom demands. Key features offered by vaulted Backups which protects against Ransomware: Isolation: Vaulted Backup data is isolated from your production storage accounts and stored in a separate tenant managed by Microsoft. This isolation helps safeguard your data against unauthorized tampering and ensures that your backups remain intact. Advanced security: Features like vault lock, multi-user authorization, and soft delete, which add additional layers of protection, ensuring that backups are immune to malicious deletion or tampering. Governance and security posture: Azure Backup integrates with the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) security posture, allowing you to better manage and govern the security of your backups. This ensures that your backups meet the right level of protection and are recoverable when you need them most. Regulatory and compliance Azure File share enables users from industries like legal, finance, and health to store crucial business data. To comply with regulations and compliance checks, one will require offsite backups with long-term retention, which snapshots alone couldn't provide. With vaulted backup users can move snapshots to a Recovery Services Vault in the same Azure region as their primary storage, with options for cross-regional replication. This setup allows backup data to be retained for up to 99 years in low-cost, highly secure, immutable storage, meeting regulatory and compliance requirements during audits and legal holds. Furthermore, with the introduction of the new cross-subscription backup capability, organizations can allocate backup data to dedicated subscriptions. This feature allows customers to consolidate all backups into a single subscription, enhancing cost management and ensuring independent access control. It enables organizations to retain control over their data protection strategy while ensuring that each department or project adheres to its specific regulatory and security requirements. Enterprise Ready Vaulted backup support now enables adherence to the widely accepted 3-2-1 backup rule for Azure files protection. Azure Backup is well integrated with Azure Business Continuity Center that can offer centralized management to gain visibility, monitor jobs, alerts and reporting. How does 3-2-1 backup help? Human errors, insider threats, or stolen credentials can lead to critical data loss. File share snapshots serve as the first line of defense to restore your data. In case, where snapshots are not available, Vaulted Backups, stored securely outside of your primary storage account, provide an additional protected copy of your data. Additionally, the copy of the backup can be replicated to another region using GRS Geo-Redundant storage. A backup policy will enable you to manage the schedule and retention for both snapshots and vault copies. In the event of deletion whether accidental or malicious the restore process will first be initiated using snapshots. If snapshots are unavailable, recovery will proceed from the vault. If the primary region is down then one can restore from the secondary region with Cross Region restore option Getting started Here are three simple steps to help you get started with configuring vaulted backup for Azure File shares: Create a Recovery services vault: A vault is a management entity that stores backups and allows you to access and manage them. Create a backup policy: Backup policy enables you to configure the frequency and retention of backups based on your business requirements. Select the storage account and File shares to backup: You can choose to back up all File share or select specific File shares from the selected storage account depending on the criticality of the data they contain. Learn more about vaulted backup for File share here. Pricing and availability Vaulted backup for Azure File share standard is generally available in these regions. Vaulted backup for premium file shares will continue to be in public preview. You will incur a protected instance fee and charges for backup storage for both standard and premium shares from 1 st April 2025. To learn about pricing, refer to the Azure File share backup pricing page. Contact us If you have questions or feedback, please reach out to us at AskAzureBackupTeam@microsoft.com.
Achieve Enhanced Security for Azure Backup with Advancements in Soft Delete and Immutability
General Availability: Immutable vault with WORM storage Now with Immutability “Locked” we ensure storage level immutability in addition to management level immutability. Once “Locked” the storage will go into WORM (write once read many) state. Immutable vaults ensure that the backup data once stored cannot be deleted until the specified retention period has expired. This feature ensures that backup data remains intact and secure, protecting it from malicious insider or outsider attacks. Immutable vaults block any operations that can result in destruction of data like reducing retention, stopping backups and deleting data. Immutable vault setting has 2 states: “Enabled” and “Locked”. When immutability is in enabled state, the Backup Contributor can disable it when needed to allow for flexibility of retention periods or stopping backups. When immutability is in locked state, the setting is irreversible making it more secure and impossible to destruct the data. Public Preview: Secure by Default with Soft Delete By default, all new vaults have soft delete enabled on them, with a retention period of 14 days, which can be disabled if needed. It will be permitted to increase the retention beyond 14 days but not reduce. Soft delete ensures the recovery of backup data even if it has been accidentally or maliciously deleted. With soft delete, deleted backup data is retained for an additional period which is configurable up to 180 days (default 14 days), allowing Backup contributors to restore it if necessary. This feature acts as a safety net, ensuring that critical data is not permanently lost due to inadvertent actions. Safeguard your data from accidental activities and malicious attacks by configuring Immutability Locked and be assured to recover quickly by yourself with secure by default soft delete. Further restrict critical actions on your vault with multi-user authentication to prevent any unintended and malicious actions.
Azure Backup: Protect SAP workloads (SAP HANA, SAP ASE and SQL) delivers more value with lower TCO
Azure Backup-SAP HANA DB Backup Delivers More Value at Lower TCO with Reduced Protected Instance Fee from 1 st September 2024. At Azure, our commitment to providing superior value to our customers is unwavering. We are thrilled to announce a significant update that will bring enhanced cost efficiency to our SAP HANA Database Backup service. Starting September 1, 2024, we are reducing the Protected Instance (PI) fees for "Azure Backup for SAP HANA on Azure VM." This change is designed to deliver more value at a lower cost, making it easier for enterprises to protect their critical data without compromising on quality or performance. New Pricing Structure: More Value, Lower Cost With the new Protected Instance (PI) fee structure effective 1st September 2024, both SAP HANA Streaming/Backint-based backups and SAP HANA Snapshot-based backups will see reduced costs. Here’s how the new pricing breaks down: HANA Backint/Streaming Backup HANA Snapshot Backup DB Size Old pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) New pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) PI Cost Savings % DB Size Old pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) New pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) PI Cost Savings % 500 GB $80 $80 No Change 1TB $160 $80 50% 1 TB $160 $80 50% 10 TB $1600 $160 90% 5TB $800 $80 90% 20 TB $3200 $320 90% 10 TB $1600 $80 95% 30 TB $4800 $480 90% HANA Streaming Backup: A flat rate of $80 (East US2) per instance, with standard regional uplift, regardless of the HANA database size. For example, if you are protecting 1.2 TB of HANA database in one instance running in the East US2 region, the New PI cost would be flat $80 (East US2 Region) per month. Previously, the cost would have been $240 + storage consumed. HANA Snapshot Backup: $80 (East US2) per 5 TB increment, with standard regional uplift. For example, if you have 10 TB of HANA database in one instance running in East US2 region, the New PI cost would be $160 + storage consumed, Previously, the cost would have been $1600 + storage consumed. Following SAP recommendation, if you opt for a weekly full streaming backup in addition to a Snapshot backup, we will apply a single PI fee applicable for HANA Snapshot backup. More details on HANA Backup TCO Savings - Azure Backup-SAP HANA DB Backup Delivers More Value at Lower TCO with Reduced Protected Instance Fee - Microsoft Community Hub For more details on the new pricing structure, visit Pricing - Cloud Backup | Microsoft Azure and Pricing Calculator | Microsoft Azure. For SQL workloads, one can also enable compression which can save 40-50% reduction in storage consumption - Tutorial - Back up SQL Server databases to Azure - Azure Backup | Microsoft Learn SAP ASE Database Backup Public Preview Launch on 19 th Nov’24 SAP applications can be deployed with different database backends such as - Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, SAP ASE and Max DB, not limited to SAP HANA. As part of our endeavor to enhance our backup support for SAP customers, we are thrilled to announce that, apart from SAP HANA and SQL Server, we are now launching Public Preview of backup support for SAP ASE (Sybase) Database on Azure Backup. Lot of existing SAP customers have been requesting us to support non-HANA DB’s like SAP ASE (Sybase) and this new workload support is a significant milestone in our commitment to providing comprehensive, reliable, and flexible backup solutions for our enterprise customers. In the Public Preview, ASE Backup will be available in non-US regions starting November 19, 2024, and in US regions beginning December 10, 2024. Key Features: Support for Cost-effective Backup policies : Weekly full + daily differential backups result in lower storage costs (as opposed to daily streaming full backups) Recovery Services Vault : All backups are streamed directly to the Azure Backup managed recovery services vault that provides security capabilities like Immutability, Soft Delete and Multiuser Auth. The vaulted backup data is stored in Microsoft-managed Azure subscription and is isolated from customer’s environment. These features ensure that the SAP ASE backup data is always secure and tamper-proof and can be recovered safely even when the source machines are compromised. 15-min RPO: As in the case of stream-based backup, log backups are streamed every 15 minutes and can be applied on top of DB backup which provides Point-In-Time recovery capability. Multiple Database Restore options: We support Alternate Location Restore (System refresh) , Original Location Restore and Restore as Files. Compression Support – Support for SAP ASE native compression can reduce storage consumption by 40-50% Striping Support – By enabling “Striping” one can see backup/restore throughput improvement of 50-60% Private Endpoint Support - Azure Backup allows you to securely perform the backup and restore operations of your data from the Recovery Services vaults using private endpoints. Private endpoints use one or more private IP addresses from your Azure Virtual Network (VNet), effectively bringing the service into your VNet. Cross Region Restore (CRR) - Allows you to restore SAP HANA databases that are hosted on Azure VMs in a secondary region, which is an Azure paired region.Generally Available: Simplifying at scale BCDR management with Azure Business Continuity center
In the contemporary digital landscape, the establishment of robust business continuity strategies is imperative for organizations navigating the complexities of technology. Given the heavy reliance on digital infrastructure, fortifying these systems against potential disruptions is crucial. In response to this challenge, we are thrilled to introduce the General availability of Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center, across all regions. Azure Backup center has now evolved into Azure Business Continuity Center, with advanced and powerful BCDR management capabilities. With the Azure Business Continuity Center, enterprises can seamlessly govern, monitor, operate, and analyze protection at-scale. This release includes support for the following key features: Insights into Protection Estate: Gain comprehensive insights into the protection estate across solutions such as Backup and Azure Site Recovery for both your Azure and Hybrid (VMware) resources. Explore more in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 1: Understand Protection Estate Summary - Microsoft Community Hub Identify and Protect Resources: Easily identify resources that are not currently protected and take proactive measures to secure them. Refer to Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 2: understand your protectable resources inventory - Microsoft Community Hub. Centralized Resource Protection: Ensure the protection of resources and execute actions from a single, centralized location. Detailed information is available in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 3: understand your protected items inventory - Microsoft Community Hub Optimize Security Configuration: Safeguard your resources against scenarios like ransomware threats, malicious attacks, and rogue admin activities. Learn how to optimize security configurations in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 4: optimize security configuration - Microsoft Community Hub Unified Monitoring: Attain quick visibility into failures in meeting business continuity SLAs through unified monitoring. Utilize various views, such as jobs, to monitor from a central location and configure alerts and notifications for timely awareness of any SLA violations regarding critical resources. Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 5: Monitoring protection - Microsoft Community Hub Ensuring Compliance: Leverage inbuilt Azure Policies to govern resources for business continuity and ensure compliance. Obtain a detailed compliance list of all assigned Azure Policies, including the number of resources within the scope of assignment that are compliant or non-compliant. ABCC seamlessly integrates with Azure Policy, empowering customers with robust compliance capabilities. Oversight of BCDR Artifacts - Efficiently create and oversee the lifecycle of artifacts such as vaults. Automate common and standard use cases, including the lifecycle management of schedules and policies established for both Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. Obtain Insights - For analyzing historical trends and gaining deeper insights on your protection across Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. Reports offer the following capabilities: Allocating and forecasting of cloud storage consumed. Auditing backups and restores. Identifying key trends at different levels of granularity. Gaining visibility and insights into cost optimization opportunities for your backups. Learn more about ABC Center to understand how it can revolutionize your business continuity journey for the resources
Former Employer Abuse
My former employer, Albert Williams, president of American Security Force Inc., keeps adding my outlook accounts, computers and mobile devices to the company's azure cloud even though I left the company more than a year ago. What can I do to remove myself from his grip? Does Microsoft have a solution against abusive employers?Public Preview: Azure Business Continuity Center is now available in all regions
In the contemporary digital landscape, the establishment of robust business continuity strategies is imperative for organizations navigating the complexities of technology. Given the heavy reliance on digital infrastructure, fortifying these systems against potential disruptions is crucial. In response to this challenge, we are thrilled to introduce the Public Preview of Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center a groundbreaking initiative designed to enhance your business's resilience across all regions. With the Azure Business Continuity Center, enterprises can seamlessly govern, monitor, operate, and analyze protection at scale. This release includes support for the following key features: Insights into Protection Estate: Gain comprehensive insights into the protection estate across solutions such as Backup and Azure Site Recovery for both your Azure and Hybrid (VMware) resources. Explore more in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 1: Understand Protection Estate Summary - Microsoft Community Hub Identify and Protect Resources: Easily identify resources that are not currently protected and take proactive measures to secure them. Refer to Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 2: understand your protectable resources inventory - Microsoft Community Hub. Centralized Resource Protection: Ensure the protection of resources and execute actions from a single, centralized location. Detailed information is available in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 3: understand your protected items inventory - Microsoft Community Hub Optimize Security Configuration: Safeguard your resources against scenarios like ransomware threats, malicious attacks, and rogue admin activities. Learn how to optimize security configurations in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 4: optimize security configuration - Microsoft Community Hub Unified Monitoring: Attain quick visibility into failures in meeting business continuity SLAs through unified monitoring. Utilize various views, such as jobs, to monitor from a central location and configure alerts and notifications for timely awareness of any SLA violations regarding critical resources. Explore unified monitoring in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 5: Monitoring protection - Microsoft Community Hub Ensuring Compliance: Leverage inbuilt Azure Policies to govern resources for business continuity and ensure compliance. Obtain a detailed compliance list view of all assigned Azure Policies, including the number of resources within the scope of assignment that are compliant or non-compliant. ABCC seamlessly integrates with Azure Policy, empowering customers with robust compliance capabilities. Learn more about ABC Center to understand how it can revolutionize your business continuity journey for the resourcesAzure Backup-SAP HANA DB Backup Delivers More Value at Lower TCO with Reduced Protected Instance Fee
We are thrilled to announce a significant update that will bring enhanced cost efficiency to our SAP HANA Database Backup service. Starting September 1, 2024, we are reducing the Protected Instance (PI) fees for "Azure Backup for SAP HANA on Azure VM." This change is designed to deliver more value at a lower cost, making it easier for enterprises to protect their critical data without compromising on quality or performance.Switch to Azure Business Continuity Center for your at scale BCDR management needs
In response to the evolving customer requirements and environments since COVID-19, including the shift towards hybrid work models and the increase in ransomware attacks, we have observed a growing trend among customers to invest in multiple vendors for data protection. To address these needs, we have developed the Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center, a streamlined, centralized management center that simplifies backup and disaster recovery across various environments (Azure, Hybrid) and solutions (Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery). Below are few resources to learn more about Azure Business Continuity Center: Revolutionize Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with Azure Business Continuity Center - Microsoft Community Hub Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 1: Understand Protection Estate Summary - Microsoft Community Hub Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 2: understand your protectable resources inventory - Microsoft Community Hub Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 3: understand your protected items inventory - Microsoft Community Hub Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 4: optimize security configuration - Microsoft Community Hub Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 5: Monitoring protection - Microsoft Community Hub ABCC, currently in public preview since November 2023, is designed as an enhanced version of the Backup Center and will eventually replace it. Getting started is simple, with no prerequisites or costs involved. Even if you've been using Backup Center, no additional action is needed to begin viewing your protection estate in Azure Business Continuity Center. To start with , simply navigate to Azure portal and search for Azure Business Continuity Center. Azure Business Continuity Center (ABCC) providers enhanced experiences for business continuity, and we want our customers to adapt to it before it replaces the Backup Center. To support this transition, we have removed the Backup Center from the global search in the Azure portal, bust there is still option available from ABCC to go to Backup Center. Backup Center will no longer appear in the Azure Portal search results across all regions. We encourage you to explore the Azure Business Continuity Center (ABCC) for your BCDR journey and provide your valuable feedback to help us enhance it to better meet your needs. If you still want to launch Backup center, you can first go to Azure Business Continuity Center, from the Azure portal search. Then, from ABCC help menu, kindly select “Go to Backup Center”. If you are transitioning to the Backup Center, please share your reasons for doing so, including any missing capabilities, performance issues, or other concerns you may have encountered. Your insights are invaluable in helping us enhance the ABCC experience.
