How to implement a disaster recovery plan with Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is one of the most interesting features of the platform. It is key to know how to implement a disaster recovery plan.

What is a recovery plan?

It’s the best way to shorten a page’s downtime. The goal is to create an exact replica of the operating system in a different location. Local backups do not offer sufficient guarantees as they are partial. They usually cause errors that end up altering the stability of the system.
If you ask yourself whether or not its design is necessary, the answer is always affirmative. It is essential for:

• Protect all critical services of a company.
• Keep active a security tool that does not alter the pace of work or income.
• Mitigate the consequences of an attack and solve the service disruption in the shortest possible time. After the identification of the alteration, the necessary measures are taken to solve the incident.
• Comply with RTOs (recovery time objectives). The plan specifies the maximum time that a service should be down. In case of not being fulfilled, another strategy would be bet.

Why isn’t a data backup enough?

Typically, you schedule a backup of your hard drives periodically and host it in a different space. During it, only the data is copied, but not the functions, programs and applications used to provide the service.
Azure is committed to replicating the servers in their entirety. That is, in case of alteration in the system, in minutes it is possible to use it again as it was moments before. Backups only allow access to the last stored, which leads to a loss of valuable information. Everything will depend on the chosen periodicity.
When using the Internet cloud, access to data is immediate and does not depend on other external factors that do affect physical servers. In fact, the failure of these can be caused by fires, floods or various breakdowns. These circumstances cannot happen in Azure given its continuous updating and maintenance.

The simplicity of Azure

You only need to access the Azure portal and replicate an Azure Virtual Machine to another region. Site Recovery is automatically updated as the system is refreshed. Recovery problems will be minimized. You can sequence the order of multitier applications running on virtual machines.
The resulting recovery plan can be tested without affecting the functionality of the website or users. Applications will always remain available, even during self-healing outages, both across regions and on-premises in Azure. To achieve this, the following steps would have to be followed.

Set up backups

The platform allows you to select the type of backup to be performed. Site Recovery makes the process easy. It is not necessary to add the corresponding guidelines. The system automatically takes care of making copies of workload-related areas in cloud or hybrid environments. Options such as Azure Virtual Machines, SAP and SQL databases, VMware machines, and on-premises Windows servers will be better protected.

Establish integrated security standards

You can select the appropriate privacy and security policies. Virtual machines can be failed over to the cloud or between data centers in the cloud. Using network security groups helps you better protect them. The Azure Backup plug-in protects data from ransomware, deletion, and isolation of backup data. Accidental deletion and multi-factor authentication are easier to avoid.

Recovery points and recovery time objectives

Both contribute to making a company’s workload easier to recover. In addition, it supports the cost of deploying, patching, monitoring, and scaling your disaster recovery infrastructure locally. There is no need to manage backup-related resources or create a second data center. Without physical infrastructure and with enormous flexibility, it is possible to improve the storage of each copy.

Compliance with ISO 27001

The backup restoration plan complies with ISO 27001. By enabling Site Recovery between Azure regions, it is possible to make the end user unaware of the error. It is possible to customize the coverage including applications that are considered essential. In addition, Azure provides the ability to restore data in seconds, availability backup, and technical support.

Cost savings

Monitoring, patching, establishing a recovery infrastructure, and implementing prevention plans is much more cost-effective. Maintaining a data center, a person in charge of its management and everything related to this type of infrastructure is quite expensive. You only need to pay for the compute resources to be used.

The commitment to the maximum possible functionality

Designing a contingency plan is synonymous with having a total guarantee of adaptability to any type of situation. As an example of a critical service,a business’s website is the gateway that customers will use to place orders, complaints, or comments. Any page can fail, but the most important thing is that the error is almost imperceptible and that services are restored more quickly.
Taking into account that the costs are more affordable and that the platform adapts easily to any type of business, the result could not be more favorable.
Azure Site Recovery is a must-have for any business that wants to be competitive and modern. The contingency plan proposed by this tool has become a very reliable one. The success of a business when facing incidents of various kinds may depend on its implementation.