Data Recovery Digest

Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery is a service that provides disaster recovery and business continuity on behalf of on-premise and cloud systems. In use since 2014, Azure Site Recovery offers near-zero recovery point objective (RPO) technology as well as the latest in data protection innovation. For those who would like to test out Microsoft Azure Site Recovery before making any kind of investment, there is a free trial available.

While Azure Site Recovery already offers support for Hyper-V virtual machines, those who rely on VMware were left in the dark – until now. Following Microsoft’s latest announcement, Azure Site Recovery now features full support for virtual machines in VMware and Hyper-V environments. A feature that was specifically requested by the customers, it’s evident that Microsoft is open to suggestions regarding Azure Site Recovery.

Mike Schutz, general manager of Cloud Platform Marketing with Microsoft, explained what prompted the latest update. He was quoted as saying: “We're listening to our customers and partners who are telling us to make sure that they can think of Azure as a platform for all of their applications and data. It's absolutely part of a broader strategy for us to offer an open and flexible infrastructure for customers to enable them to have Azure run all of their applications.” He also made it clear that they plan on listening to their customers in the future by saying: “We'll continue to listen to our customers and based on their need for us to support other platforms, we'll obviously do that.”

Schutz went on to describe his company’s view on the current state of cloud computing as well as the services Microsoft Azure is able to fulfill. He said: “We believe that the hybrid cloud model of using both public and private cloud is a model that is here to stay for a long time. For us it's very, very central to our overall strategy and approach because we feel it's very important to our customers. We provide a set of hybrid cloud services that can help provide the connective tissue between the private cloud and public cloud, with the goal of making the public cloud feel like a seamless extension of our customers' private infrastructure.”

Other features of Azure Site Recovery include fully automated protection and replication of virtual machines, remote system health monitoring, no-impact testing and fully customizable recovery options. Direct benefits include decreased downtimes, reduced operating expenses and access to expert-level technical support.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), a service integrated into Microsoft Azure, was updated along with Azure Site Recovery. New features of Azure AD include the administrator’s ability to establish specific access rules on individual user groups, support for conditional access policies, multi-factor authentication processes and increased security across the board.

For more information on Azure Site Recovery, Azure AD or any of the services and features available through Microsoft Azure, please visit their website at www.azure.microsoft.com. Here you’ll find online documentation, current pricing information, community resources, technical support and various downloads.