What is Microsoft Azure Cloud Backup?
Azure Cloud Backup is the service that you use to backup and restore your data in the Microsoft cloud.
It replaces your existing on-premises or off-site backup solution with a cloud-based solution that is reliable, secure, and cost-competitive. It also helps protect assets that run in the cloud.
Azure Backup provides recovery services built on a world-class infrastructure that is scalable, durable, and highly available.
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Introduction
Protect your critical assets wherever they are
Your data and applications are everywhere—on servers, clients, and in the cloud.
Backup can protect your critical applications, including SharePoint, Exchange, and SQL Server; files and folders; Windows servers and clients; and Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machines.
Compelling cloud-based backup alternative to tape
Due to business or compliance requirements, organizations are required to protect their data for years, and over time this data grows exponentially.
Traditionally, tape has been used for long-term retention. Backup provides a compelling alternative to tape with significant cost savings, shorter recovery times, and up to 99 years of retention.
Efficient and flexible online backup services
Backup is efficient over the network and on your disk. Once the initial seeding is complete, only incremental changes are sent at a defined frequency.
Built-in features, such as compression, encryption, longer retention, and bandwidth throttling, help boost IT efficiency.
Secure and reliable backup as a service
Your backup data is secure over the wire and at rest. The backup data is stored in a geo-replicated storage which maintains 6 copies of your data across two Azure datacenters.
With 99.9% service availability, Backup provides operational peace of mind.
Using vault credentials to authenticate with the Azure Backup service
A short video following the steps for using vault credentials to authenticate with the Azure Backup service.
Download, install and register the Azure Backup agent
A short video following the steps for downloading, installing and registering the Azure Backup agent on to Windows Server and client machines.
Backup and restore from a Windows server or client machine
A short video showing the steps for backup and restore from a Windows server or Windows client machine.
How does Azure Backup differ from Azure Site Recovery?
Many customers confuse backup recovery and disaster recovery. Both capture data and provide restore semantics, but their core value propositions are different.
Azure Backup backs up data on-premises and in the cloud.
Azure Site Recovery coordinates virtual machine and physical server replication, failover, and failback.
Both services are important because your disaster recovery solution needs to keep your data safe and recoverable (Backup) and keep your workloads available and accessible (Site Recovery) when outages occur.
The following concepts will help you make important decisions around backup and disaster recovery:
Concept | Details | Backup | Disaster recovery (DR) |
| Recovery point objective (RPO) | The amount of acceptable data loss if a recovery needs to be done. | Backup solutions have wide variability in their acceptable RPO. Virtual machine backups usually have an RPO of one day, while database backups have RPOs as low as 15 minutes. | Disaster recovery solutions have low RPOs. The DR copy can be behind by a few seconds or a few minutes. |
| Recovery time objective (RTO) | The amount of time that it takes to complete a recovery or restore. | Because of the larger RPO, the amount of data that a backup solution needs to process is typically much higher, which leads to longer RTOs. For example, it can take days to restore data from tapes, depending on the time it takes to transport the tape from an off-site location. | Disaster recovery solutions have smaller RTOs because they are more in sync with the source. Fewer changes need to be processed. |
| Retention | How long data needs to be stored | For scenarios that require operational recovery (data corruption, inadvertent file deletion, OS failure), backup data is typically retained for 30 days or less. From a compliance standpoint, data might need to be stored for months or even years. Backup data is ideally suited for archiving in such cases. | Disaster recovery needs only operational recovery data, which typically takes a few hours or up to a day. Because of the fine-grained data capture used in DR solutions, using DR data for long-term retention is not recommended. |
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According to Forrester Data Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey 2016 , the Top 5 Uses for the cloud
Cloud Services | Percentage |
| Backup-As-A-Service | 43% |
| File-Sharing-As-A-Service | 29% |
| Database-As-A-Service | 28% |
| Cloud Platforms (include IaaS and PaaS) | 27% |
| Storage-As-A-Service | 27% |
