Disaster recovery is one of the key needs for any online business running in any cloud. Microsoft Azure is now capable of providing this feature.
Today, Rochak Mittal Principal Program Manager of Cloud + Enterprise announced that the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is now available. This capability now allows you to easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription. This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, allows you to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all your IaaS based applications running on Azure.
From the blog announcement:
Disaster Recovery for Azure IaaS applications extends ASR's existing functionality, and further simplifies the onboarding experience for customers:
Offered “as-a-Service” – You do not need any additional software infrastructure (VMs or appliances) in your Azure subscription to enable this functionality. You avoid all the complexity and cost associated with deploying, monitoring, patching and maintaining any DR infrastructure.
Simplified experience – Enabling cross-region DR for an application is so simple that all you need to do is select the VMs you want to protect, choose a target Azure region, select replication settings and you are good to go.
Application-aware recovery – Whether you are an application owner, disaster recovery admin or a managed service provider, ASR lets you stay in control at all times - you can decide when and how to orchestrate a failover. With support for best-in-class recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and ASR's powerful Recovery Plans, your applications can meet the recovery requirements that your business demands.
Non-disruptive DR drills – With ASR’s test failover capability, you can easily perform a DR drill anytime without any impact to the primary production workload or to ongoing replication, giving you the confidence that your DR solution will work when you need it.