Minimizing disaster recovery time with Azure Site Recovery
In this tutorial, we will learn and understand the need for a disaster recovery solution with Azure Site Recovery. You should know that for defining and choosing a disaster recovery plan the main step is to perform a business impact analysis. That is to say, this process helps in:
- Firstly, identifying applications that support critical business processes
- Secondly, identifying the impact on the business in case of an outage
- Lastly, guiding in developing the right disaster recovery strategy for your business.
After performing the analysis and identifying critical applications, the next step is to chart down your disaster recovery strategy. This usually translates into:
- Firstly, identifying the right employees or admins for handling the disaster recovery segment
- Secondly, setting targets for recover time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)
- Thirdly, identifying the right product or service based on the needs
- Fourthly, identifying all the required software and hardware resources needed
- Then, frequently testing the disaster recovery strategy
- Lastly, making continuous improvements for improving the RPO and RTO by identifying and rectifying failure points if any.
Azure Site Recovery
As an organization it is necessary to adopt a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy for keeping your data safe, and your apps and workloads online. And for this Azure Recovery Services contributes to your BCDR strategy:
- Firstly, Site Recovery helps in ensuring business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. Moreover, it replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. And, when an outage occurs at the primary site, you failover to the secondary location, and access apps from there. However, you can failback to the primary location after it starts running again.
- Secondly, it provides the Azure Backup service for keeping your data safe and recoverable.
However, Site Recovery can manage replication for:
- Firstly, Azure VMs replicating between Azure regions.
- Secondly, On-premises VMs, Azure Stack VMs, and physical servers.
Configuring disaster recovery of Azure VM using Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is one of the leaders in the space of disaster recovery with the best in class RTO and RPO. Azure provides the service edge for enabling, testing, and performing disaster recovery for customers in just a few clicks. However, one of the key differences while selecting a disaster recovery solution is the availability of integrations with additional resources. This will help in achieving parity between source and target. Further, this will reduce the RTO as it reduces the number of manual steps required once the virtual machine is brought up online in the target. Moreover, the failure points are also minimized with this.
However, there are multiple components a disaster administrator needs to handle for ensuring that a target disaster recovery site is activated with similar configurations in the event of a disaster. Moreover, it also includes the internal load balancers, the network security groups, and the public IPs used for accessing the virtual machines from outside of Azure.
With Azure Site Recovery, you can also provide the input for corresponding network resources in the target while configuring disaster recovery for your virtual machines. And, with this, the complexities of having to deal with scripts or manual steps will be removed and it also reduces the RTO significantly.
Azure provides you with high availability and reliability for your mission-critical workloads, and you can choose for improving your protection. And also meet compliance requirements using the disaster recovery by Azure Site Recovery.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation