For many small to mid-size businesses, a natural disaster or a ransomware attack could mean catastrophe. In fact, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), nearly 40% of small businesses never reopen after suffering a natural disaster. Additionally, downtime due to ransomware costs small businesses an average of $100,000 per incident.
Building a comprehensive business continuity/disaster recovery strategy, then, is critical to long-term business health. With Azure for disaster recovery and backups, Microsoft provides a flexible, secure solution to protect your organization at a lower cost than traditional backup and recovery methods.
Safeguard Both Data and Workloads
With Azure, Microsoft offers two cloud services that work seamlessly together to keep you up and running no matter what nature or cyber criminals throw at you. This two-pronged approach provides protection at both the data level and the application level.
- Azure Backup – Protects your data with incremental backups to the cloud. Your data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Recovery time is
much shorter than with traditional tape backups, and you can save data for up to 99 years. - Azure Site Recovery (ASR) – Provides protection at the application level by replicating any application running on a supported machine (virtual or physical). If the primary site goes down, workloads remain available on a secondary site for as long as necessary.
Employing Azure for disaster recovery and backups does more than protect vital business data and keep your business up and running. This proven solution can also reduce operational costs and speed your recovery time. The cloud environment also makes disaster recovery testing straightforward, building confidence.
Budget Friendly
With Azure, you pay only for the resources you use. Services are scalable, billed monthly on a per-server basis. Thus, small businesses can afford enterprise-level protection, with services that expand in pace with business growth.
A multi-site financial services organization that adopted a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution based on Azure Site Recovery estimated that the solution reduced its disaster recovery costs by 60-65%.
The security of guaranteed uptime means you avoid costly budget hits brought on by disabled systems or data loss. Monthly subscription fees are both reasonable and predictable, freeing up resources for investment in growth initiatives.
Reduced Recovery Time
The organization mentioned above using Azure for disaster recovery and backups reported that the solution dramatically reduced recovery time. Before implementing the Azure-based solution, restoring from backup required at least three to five days. Azure shortened recovery time to minutes or hours, with maximum data loss of no more than 30 seconds.
With Azure Site Recovery, organizations customize disaster recovery plans to be as simple or as complex as their business requires. With a plan tailored to your precise business needs, restoring workloads and files involves minimal or no interruption to operations.
Simplified Testing
For many businesses using traditional backup methods, it is difficult at best to conduct a full disaster recovery test. In many cases, businesses can test individual systems but find it difficult to conduct failover tests of the entire operation.
With Azure Site Recovery, you test disaster recovery plans in a virtualized environment. This means you can conduct comprehensive tests whenever you like without disrupting business at the primary site.
Optimizing Azure for Disaster Recovery and Backups
With Azure, Microsoft has created a powerful, feature-rich tool that offers a host of options for business continuity and disaster recovery. You can save money, reduce recovery time and gain the confidence that comes with regular testing of your complete disaster recovery plan.
At the same time, the multitude of options available can prove complex and intimidating. A managed services provider (MSP) with proven Microsoft expertise can help you configure your Azure solution to best meet your business needs. With the right partner, you gain the confidence that your business will rise above the storm.
eMazzanti Technologies has enjoyed a long partnership with Microsoft and was one of the first companies invited to participate in the Microsoft Azure Mentor Program. This enables eMazzanti to offer its customers higher level cloud services and access to exclusive technical resources. Our experts will help you configure the best solution to build a secure foundation for growth.
