All time availability of services is the primary necessity of a business as interruptions prove to be costly by leading to loss of customers and revenue. The kind of proactive and reactive availability required by the businesses can be achieved through durable IT architecture and data protection options with backup being the mainstay of them all. Backup is all about how you can quickly ‘back up’ from a situation of disaster or data loss.

ESG research shows that improving data backup and recovery has consistently been one of the top 5 IT priorities of organizations.

With digital transformation, the evolving requirements for resiliency and faster recoverability necessitate that organizations should either supplement or replace their “traditional backup” with other forms of data protection as well.

The high volumes of data that advanced technologies like AI, IoT generate need a sophisticated backup mechanism, like cloud backup. Key to both disaster recovery and business continuity is cloud-based data backup that allows companies to ensure their digital assets remain all time safe and secure, no matter what.

By 2018, the number of enterprises using the cloud as a backup destination will double up from 11% at the beginning of 2016.- Gartner

But not every cloud backup solution offers the same level of performance, reliability or flexibility so businesses must choose the best like Microsoft Azure backup and recovery solutions.

Microsoft Azure sets the bar for performance and scale, leads in backups, disaster recovery, compliance, trust measures and offers best-in-class support for the most demanding enterprise applications and helps organizations to focus more on building manageable IT environments optimized for demanding workloads.

Azure backup solution – an introduction

Azure Backup is a secure and reliable, backup as a service (BaaS) solution offered by Microsoft that businesses can use to protect and restore their critical applications and data on-premise and in the cloud.

This cloud service is a cost competitive solution that provides protection to the business data irrespective of its location, be it in the enterprise data center or in public cloud or in distant branch offices.

Azure cloud backup with Azure Site Recovery offers a complete Disaster Recovery (DR) solution with

• Cost-efficiency and zero maintenance
• Consistent tools for offsite backups.
• Operational recovery and availability of unified application and data protection.

Advantages of Azure Backup services for a business

1. High Availability

Microsoft Azure Online Backup offers unlimited scaling to the Azure cloud users and delivers high-availability, keeping business continuously operational for long hours without charging any additional maintenance or monitoring overhead. Further, it allows you to set real time alerts providing information about events and promises operational peace of mind with 99.9% service availability assurance.

2. Automatic allocation and storage management

With Azure Backup storage, businesses do not need to pay extra for using on-premises storage devices. It automatically allocates and manages backup storage.

It offers consistent management for Hybrid IT environments that often require heterogeneous storage – on-premises and in the cloud.

3. Enhanced security and reliability

Azure backup offers storage replication that stores and secures your data in two ways -locally redundant storage (LRS) and geo-replicated storage (GRS).

Locally redundant storage option safeguards your data from local hardware failures, whereas GRS keeps your data highly secure and durable by maintaining six copies of your data across the two Azure data centers.

4. No limit for data transfer

With Azure Cloud Backup, businesses get the underlying power of transferring an unlimited amount of data – both inbound or outbound. Also, there is no additional charge for the transferred data.

5. Reduced restoration time

Restoration of an application-consistent backup requires no additional work to restore the database application or virtual machine and allows you to return quickly to a running state.

Cloud Backup offers application-consistent backups, which requires no additional fixes to restore the backup copy of the data.

6. Secure transmission and storage of data

Data must be protected during its transmission across networks or while it is at rest, from unauthorized users. Data Encryption protects the data in transit or rest by transforming it into a code which is readable only by the authorized users (who have access to the key).

Thus, secure transmission and storage of your business data in the public cloud. In Azure, your encryption passphrase is stored locally and is never transmitted or stored in Azure. Your encryption key remains with you and only you.

This infrastructure less backup helps businesses to boost IT efficiency with its in-built features like bandwidth throttling, short term and long term retention- with a limit of 9999 recovery points per protected instance and compression.

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