By this point, most businesses know that they're playing with fire if they don't have a backup and recovery solution. However, to maintain minimal downtime and therefore losses, they must also be able to return to normal functioning quickly. Microsoft's Disaster Recovery as a Service solution, Azure Site Recovery (ASR), allows organizations to do just that.
Named one of Gartner's industry leaders in 2019, Azure Site Recovery is a versatile solution that can be utilized in both cloud and on-premises environments. By replicating physical and virtual machines from your primary site to a secondary location, Site Recovery is able to rapidly restore access to apps in the event of an outage. Once the primary site is up and running again, you can fail back to it without a hitch.
There are three main scenarios in which ASR can be utilized: automatic VM replication from one Azure region to another, automatic replication from on-premises virtual machines to Azure VMs, and as a management tool between two on-premises sites. It's not just limited to Hyper-V, either, with additional support for Windows and Linux VMWare machines.
Azure Site Recovery Benefits
Taking the ASR approach to disaster recovery comes with significant benefits to cost, availability, and usability while allowing for streamlined replication and compliance testing.
Cost
The headline-grabbing advantage of ASR is its ability to remove the need for a business to create and maintain a secondary data center. Reducing deployment, monitoring, patching, and physical maintenance costs allows businesses to invest in other areas of their infrastructure.
Availability
You're guaranteed 99.9% service availability with Azure Site Recovery. The replicated Azure storage utilized is further resilient by default, with at least three copies in LRS and the choice of GRS to prevent regional outages.
When an issue does occur, ASR captures both the in-memory data and disk data of applications to enable an experience where many employees won't even notice there's an outage. Planned failovers for expected outages will have zero data loss, and unplanned ones minimal.
Usability
ASR significantly reduces disaster recovery complexity, allowing for management from a single location in the Azure portal that provides a unified overview of all protected instances. Workflows can be configured to automatically run during failover, with ASR automatically provisioning and attaching storage disks.
Replication and compliance testing
With ASR, you won't have to shell out on the creation of servers for drills or disrupt your live environment or ongoing replications. The ability to easily test how your data will perform in an unplanned scenario is often very underrated and ensures there won't be any nasty surprises.
Choosing the Right Partner
These significant benefits are made even stronger with a good partner like VirtuWorks to help you fully realize them. As well as stable monthly fees with no long-term obligations, our world-class engineers will help you integrate Site Recovery with your network and existing BCDR technologies, test regularly to ensure resilience, and make sure you hit your RTO and TPO objectives. Need additional help? Our experts will be a phone call away 24/7/365.
If you'd like to hear more about how VirtuWorks can help keep your business available and resilient, get in contact today.