To use some backup applications, you need to purchase hardware, software, or a unique appliance for your backup to run. With Azure Backup, however, you can reduce costs, and get a greater reach into your infrastructure.
This post will explain why and how to use Azure Backup for data backup and storage needs.
The importance of backup
The vast majority of companies do not have enough resources for a resilient and redundant environment so that a failure in backup hardware or operating systems does not affect backup routines.
Azure Backup allows a backup routine to be deployed easily and quickly. You can have resilient backups with a lower automatic cost. But what should be well-defined regardless of the environment to be backed up is the backup policy. The right backup policy will prevent backups that are not useful. Much more importantly, backups performed without a policy do not count when backup times are too long or there was no restore test according to the principles of security and business continuity.
You can create backup routines for both virtual machines in the Azure environment and file folders. Regardless of the type of backup you want to perform, you need to create a vault to store your data and define what type of redundancy will be used in the backup routine.
Creating the backup resource
To get started, sign into the Azure portal. (If you already have an account, you can just sign in. If not, you can create an account and try Azure for free.) Next, in the menu on the left side, click New. In the search field, type Backup and choose Backup Site Recovery.
Let’s create a Service Recovery. For this example, I’ll create one with the name BKPAzure. We also need to create a new Security Group. Here, we’ll call it BKP. The Location is defined according to your need for redundancy, or the amount that will be charged according to each location. (Depending on the chosen location, we can have an increase in latency.)
With this, our backup is created, and ready for the creation of backup policies. On the home screen, we can see the dashboard created for this backup environment.
In Overview, we have backup status information, alerts, site health recovery, and the backup status of VMs. You can also add a resource backup, a replication, or delete the vault.
Backup Dashboard
The most important parts of this dashboard are:
Monitoring and Reports
This is where we will monitor the reports of backups made, and restores and alerts for incomplete and incomplete backups. Stick to this screen constantly, because this is where you will check the health of your backup routine.
Policies
This is where backup policies for your environment will be created. This will also cover how the process should be done, data retention time, and backup frequency. You can create backup routines according to the application, service, or server.
Protect Items
This is where the servers and files that are backed up are found, as well as the count of backups. In addition, the items that have been replicated are available here. You can also create replications.
The handling of the tool through the dashboard is intuitive so that following backup routines is simplified and automatic. Azure Backup has other options that allow you to have a healthy, functional, and protected environment that can give real feedback if a disaster strikes.
How Azure Backup works
Azure Backup provides features that make it competitive with other tools available on the market, such as automatic management and reduced cost of local storage so that the user pays only for what is used. Scalability is unlimited, and no maintenance or supervision is required. (It is up to the administrator to configure event alerts, since high data availability is the focal point of Azure Backup.)
Azure Backup offers local redundancy storage consisting of three copies of the data in the same data center of the same region, and geo-redundant storage (which is almost the same thing, but replication is in another region). This allows for greater data security and availability. Data transfer is unlimited, and Azure does not charge for the transmitted data. If Azure Import/Export is used for a large mass of data, it will be associated with the input data, and the cost can be calculated in the offline data stream. There is also data encryption, and it’s compatible with applications such as SQL and Exchange.
Conclusion
With all this information, we can conclude that Azure Backup is an extremely competitive tool in the market and offers new possibilities with technologies focused on cloud computing. It reduces deployment and maintenance costs. Deployment is made easy, and with a good backup policy, your data is protected in the event of a disaster or other circumstance, and will be less of a concern for the team.
