In the event of a disaster, the most defining factor of how well your organisation recovers is your disaster recovery plan. Making sure that you have the best disaster recovery strategy will ensure that you’re prepared for anything that comes your way, and will let you take action in the case of a catastrophe.

The cloud is by far the best solution for disaster recovery in the modern world. It offers a host of benefits when it comes to business continuity, reliability, and cost, and will ensure that in the case of a disaster, you can get back up and running as quickly as possible.

In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of using Microsoft Azure for disaster recovery, and everything that you need to know to make your disaster recovery plan successful. We’ll also go over some best practices for you to ensure that your disaster recovery plan is as tight as possible.

What is Disaster Recovery in the Cloud?

Disaster recovery in the Cloud is a set of strategies that businesses use to back up their organisation’s data using the cloud. This means that instead of using an on-premise infrastructure to back up your organisation’s data, you can instead use the cloud.

This has a host of different benefits for your business —

  • Reduced Downtime: A cloud-based disaster recovery strategy can get your business up and running again much faster than traditional methods, due to the readily available nature of the cloud.
  • Cost-Effective: The cloud is way more cost-effective than the expenditure required for a traditional backup. Cloud providers offer far more flexibility also, meaning that you’ll save money in the long run by only paying for resources that you use.
  • Scalability: Cloud-based resources can be scaled to meet your needs, meaning that you can easily and quickly scale depending on what’s required at that moment.
  • Security: Cloud servers are far more secure, due to the robust security provided by providers such as Microsoft — their servers are stored under maximum security, after all. The cloud also protects you from ransomware attacks, by storing your data outside of your organisation.

Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery Solutions

Azure Backup

Azure Backup is a cloud-based data protection and backup solution designed to protect your data, applications, and workloads. It exists to protect your organisation from incidents like accidental deletion of data, hardware failure, and ransomware attacks.

Here are some of the key benefits of Azure Backup —

  • Protects Diverse Environments: Azure Backup can back up data running on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. This means that you can have a unified backup strategy for your whole IT infrastructure.
  • Simple: Azure Backup is a simple interface, eliminating the need for complex on-premise backup solutions.
  • Cost-effective: Azure Backup use a pay-as-you-go model, so you only pay for the storage space you use, instead of having to overprovision with on-premise hardware to meet future needs.
  • Recovery Options: You can use Azure Backup for both short-term and long-term data retention, letting you easily restore files, folders, entire VMs, or even databases depending on your needs.

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is a Disaster Recovery tool designed specifically for protecting your workloads in the cloud and hybrid cloud environments. It’s designed to minimise downtime for your business during outages or other cloud-based issues.

It does this by continually replicating data from your source location to a separate Azure region, which you can use as a recovery site. This has many benefits, such as a simple way to protect your cloud workloads, as well as the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that exists throughout the cloud.

Azure Archive Storage

Azure Archive Storage is a service that exists within Azure Blob Storage that is meant for storing data that is infrequently accessed and needs to be retained for a long period, protecting this data from accidentally being wiped.

Here are some of the benefits of using Azure Archive Storage —

  • Cost-Effective: Much like the rest of the cloud, Azure Archive Storage is incredibly economical.
  • Durability: Microsoft guarantees a minimum 99.9999999999999999999% durability for stored data, ensuring your stored data is safe.
  • Secure: Azure Archive Storage leverages multiple layers of security, such as server-side encryption for data at rest and SSL/TLS during transit.

Best Practices for Azure Disaster Recovery

Regularly Test Recovery Procedures

Ensuring that your implementation actually works and does what it needs to is vital. After all, in an emergency, things will only get worse if your data recovery plan fails to be effective.

The way of fixing this is by ensuring to test your recovery procedures to ensure that they will work in your time of need — and doing so regularly. Finding issues in this will ensure that you don’t meet any problems in the case of disaster.

Implement Geo-redundant Backup

Geo-redundant backup is the process of storing your data in geographically isolated locations. This will ensure that, in the event of a disaster at one location, your data will be secure at the other locations.

The best way of doing this is the 3-2-1 backup principle. Use 3 copies of your data, in 2 different media to enhance redundancy, and keep at least one of those far off-site (geo-redundancy).

Automate the Recovery Process Where Possible

Automating the recovery process will help you get back on track as quickly as possible. After all, in the event of a disaster, humans can tend to panic and make mistakes.

Automated disaster recovery removes any risk of human error, and ensures that everything is automatically set into place, ensuring that recovery is not only swift but can be done at times when the right personnel aren’t available to facilitate.

How We Can Help

Disaster recovery is vital for every organisation, and taking advantage of the cloud is the best way to be able to do this. By using the Azure Disaster Recovery suite of tools, you can ensure that your organisation is protected.

Looking to get started with Azure but don’t know where to begin? Reach out to us now, and we’ll give you a helping hand along your Azure journey. We’re here to support you and will ensure that you have everything you need.

Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.