Microsoft Azure has become the most effective solution for your Disaster Recovery plan that I have ever seen, especially in terms of cost to implement compared to the abilities you get. You can use Azure to back up your systems and/or replicate them in their entirety so that during an emergency, and even for testing purposes, they can be turned on in the cloud and accessed just as they were when running on your on-premise hardware. The cost of doing this is so inexpensive it will shock you, which is why I tell people that you really need to be doing this as no other solutions makes sense anymore.

Site Recovery in Azure offer two primary features. The first is a traditional backup method using the standard Windows backup application that now comes on all versions of Windows, but requires an additional agent to backup to Azure. Any operating system from Windows 7 to Server 2012R2 can be backed up, whether it's a physical or virtual machine. However, where Site Recovery really shine is in Hyper-V replication from On-Premise to Azure.

What replication does, specifically in the Microsoft Hyper-V role, is take a virtual machine running on a Windows Hyper-V host and replicate it in its entirety on a periodic schedule to another Hyper-V host. Since the January 2015 feature update to Microsoft Azure, MS now allows you to replicate from your on-premise Hyper-V host to Azure, taking your entire server infrastructure, or as many parts of it you want, and staging it in Azure ready to be turned on at a moment's notice should an emergency arise such as a hurricane, or the sudden loss of the primary site.

The replication schedule gives you three choices: 30 seconds, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes. It blows me away to think about how much this costs to do the traditional way mere months ago, and now you can suffer the complete loss of your on-premise infrastructure and never lose more than 15 minutes of data, and be running in Azure in a matter of minutes from the point of failure. I hate to use clichés, but this is a game changer. Fortune 500 style I.T. disaster recovery is now accessible to the small business owner for pennies compared to the old way of doing things.

Lots of I.T. firms and solutions can "backup" your important data, but where many fall short is in the "recovery" aspect. Azure greatly simplifies what I call true Disaster Recovery, and at a cost you just can't refuse. If you want to know more, give me a call, I'd be glad to demo the system for you and provide an estimate of cost based on your current system.

Michael Zenzer

Information Technology Manager, MCSE/MCITP | Security+