Microsoft Azure Will Keep Your Business Running—No Matter What
Disaster recovery should be a primary concern for organizations of all sizes and types.
No matter what the cause, when your business is taken offline, you have to know that you can return to your work quickly, without any subsequent data loss.
No matter what your business continuity processes maybe, if you’re not using the cloud, then they’re not complete. You could be opening yourself up to a number of key data loss risks…
Is Your Data At Risk?
Even if you have a secondary backup somewhere onsite, it’s still vulnerable to all the same onsite factors:
- Hardware Failure causes 40% of data loss incidents.Hard drives fail every day for a variety of reasons. While some failures occur simply because the hardware becomes worn out, others fail prematurely due to external factors like:
- Overheating
- Water or fire damage
- Exposure to magnetic fields
- Power outages or surges
- Impact due to being dropped
- Software Failure causes 34% of data loss incidents. Similarly, errors with your software can be just as detrimental to your data. Running too many programs at once, or relying on outdated or unstable software can quickly lead to a crash, which will often lose any unsaved work you had open when the program crashed.
- Power Outages cause 35% of data loss incidents. The fact is that mother nature doesn’t care if you backed up your work or not. A server room flood, vital infrastructure being knocked out by winds and even worse during a major weather event can knock out power, and quickly erase both local and offsite data reserves if your backups aren’t far enough away from your offices.
- Human Error causes 20% of data loss incidents. Every day we create, update, save and delete files; it’s just part of our everyday business life. It’s no wonder that sometimes, we delete files or overwrite files by accident. It’s just the cost of doing business.
- Security Breaches, Computer Viruses, And Malware Infections cause 23% of data loss incidents. Data loss is often the result of poor digital security; without the right defenses, cybercriminals can easily infect an IT system with ransomware or other types of malware and compromise company data.
That’s why you need to take every possible step to protect your data (not to mention the availability of your business-critical apps)…
Microsoft Azure Will Enhance Your Disaster Recovery Capabilities
Azure is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud computing platform—you and your team can rely on this solution to help you cut costs by hosting off-site and benefit from a totally scalable configuration that fits your needs.
According to Acronis’ 2019 World Backup Day Survey, 48.3% of surveyed businesses already use a cloud-based backup exclusively, and an additional 26.8% use a combination of cloud and onsite backup.
With Azure, data is backed up to a remote, cloud-based server. The data is stored in, and accessible from multiple distributed and connected resources that comprise a cloud.
- You and your staff can remotely access the provider’s services using a secure login application to back up files from your computers to the online storage server.
- As part of your disaster recovery plan, the remote, off-site cloud storage ensures that the data remains safe if your local data is affected by a disaster such as a fire, flood, cyberattack or accidental deletion by an employee.
- Files and data are automatically saved to the cloud backup service on a regular, scheduled basis. The information can also be automatically backed up anytime that changes are made.
- The cloud also allows for an automated failover system, letting you quickly reroute both data and communications in the event of a failed connection.
What Is Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery?
While the cloud offers general and basic safeguards against data loss, Microsoft Azure provides even more extensive features to support your business and data continuity. It has been designed to provide greater continuity of service accessibility and data backup, allowing organizations to continue working even during outages.
How Does Disaster Recovery Work In Azure?
The key business continuity and disaster recovery feature that Microsoft Azure delivers is Site Recovery. This feature supports business continuity by keeping critical apps and workloads in operation during outages.
What Is Site Recovery in Azure?
Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you failover to a secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it seamlessly—that means no downtime.
Does Azure Site Recovery Provide Disaster Recovery For Virtual Machines?
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery manages the continuous availability of the following:
- Azure VMs between regions
- On-premises virtual machines
- Physical servers
- On-premises machines (to secondary datacenters)
Microsoft Azure Is The Key To Your Disaster Recovery
Microsoft Azure will address the most common data loss causes and availability issues during outages.
Site Recovery ensures you always have secure and easy access to everything you need to continue working and serving clients. With Azure, you benefit from speed, scalability, and lower operating costs—plus the burden of management is basically alleviated.
Need help migrating to or managing Microsoft Azure? Get in touch with the Realized Solutions team today.
