GreenPages Blog

As an IT professional, you need to stay current on all things tech; with articles from industry experts and GreenPages' staff, you get the info you need to help your organization compete and succeed!

All Posts

Fun Facts about Microsoft Azure

Looking for some helpful facts about Microsoft Azure? Wondering whether Azure or AWS is right for your organization? Here is the first in a series about Microsoft Azure solutions offered to date.

Azure Backup, ok… wait, what? I need to do backup in the cloud? No one told me that!

Facts about Microsoft Azure

Yes Virginia, you need to have a backup solution in the cloud. To keep this high level below I attempted to outline what the Azure backup offering really is. There are several protections built into the Azure platform that help customers protect their data as well as options to recover from a failure.

In a normal, on premise scenario, host based hardware and networking failures are protected at the hypervisor level. In Azure you do not see this because control of the hypervisor has been removed. Azure, however, is designed to be highly available meeting and exceeding the posted SLAs associated with the service

Hardware failures of storage are also protected against within Azure. At the lowest end you have Local Redundant storage where they maintain 3 copies of your data within a region. The more common and industry preferred method is Geo-Redundant storage which keeps 3 copies in your region and 3 additional copies in another datacenter, somewhere geographically dispersed based on a complex algorithm. The above protections help to insure survivability of your workloads.

Important to note: The copies in the second datacenter are crash consistent copies so it should not be considered a backup of the data but more of a recovery mechanism for a disaster.

Did I hear you just ask about Recovery Services in Azure? Why yes, we have two to talk about today.

  • Azure Backup
  • Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery – This scenario both orchestrates site recovery as well as provides a destination for virtual machines. Microsoft currently supports Hyper-V to Azure, Hyper-V to Hyper-V or VMware to VMware recovery scenarios with this method.

Azure Backup is a destination for your backups. Microsoft offers traditional agents for Windows Backup and the preferred platform, Microsoft System Center 2012 - Data Protection Manager. Keeping the data in the cloud, Azure holds up to 120 copies of the data and can be restored as needed. At this time the Azure Windows backup version only protects files. It will not do Full System or Bare Metal backups of Azure VMs.

As of this blog post to get a traditional full system backup there is a recommend two-step process where you use Windows Backup which can capture a System State backup and then enable Azure Backup to capture this into your Azure Backup Vault.

There are 2 other methods that exist but currently the jury is out on the validity of these offerings. They are VM Capture and Blob Snapshot.

  • VM capture – which is equivalent to a VM snapshot
  • Blob Snapshot – This is equivalent to a LUN snapshot

As I said these are options but considered by many too immature at this time and respectfully not widely adopted. Hopefully, this provides some clarity around Azure and as with all things Microsoft Cloud related, Microsoft issues new features almost daily now. Check back again for more updates on what Azure can do for your organization!

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Related Posts

New SEC Rules for Reporting Cybersecurity Incidents Are Coming

By Jay Pasteris, GreenPages CIO and CISO The SEC is proposing new cybersecurity rules for public companies. GreenPages' Chief Information Officer & Chief Information Security Officer, Jay Pasteris, looks at the pros and cons of these rules and offers advice on how your company can prepare.

CIO Fireside Chat Recap: Responding to a Ransomware Attack

By Mario Brum, VP of Practice Area and Technical Advisory Services, GreenPages   Mario Brum hosted our inaugural CIO Fireside Chat, an online event for business executives and IT experts about the latest tech topics and trends. In this blog post, Mario recaps the discussion on responding to ransomware attacks and shares data from a real-time poll showing how top cybersecurity leaders responded to this controversial topic. 

How Microsoft Purview Simplifies and Secures Your Organization's Data

By David Barter, GreenPages Microsoft Technologies Practice Lead Managing disparate data sources is a challenge for today's hybrid workforces. But Microsoft Purview can simplify your data security, governance, and compliance.