With the constant rise in ransomware attacks, it is imperative to have a plan in place for how to recover from an attack. What happens if your business suffers from one of these attacks and loses all of its data?
You can reduce your security risks by working with Microsoft Azure Site Recovery and creating a detailed plan for your recovery process.
What is Azure Site Recovery?
Azure Site Recovery is a cloud-based service that helps you recover your virtual machines and applications in the event of a disaster.
It’s a cloud-based solution that protects your on-premises virtual machines and applications by replicating them to Azure. If a disaster occurs, you can recover your data from Azure with minimal downtime.
If disaster strikes and you need to recover your on-premises resources quickly, this is the perfect solution!
Why use Azure Site Recovery?
Azure Site Recovery allows you to protect an entire production workload with automation and orchestration, whether your company is running on-premises or in the cloud.
This service provides:
- Protection for applications and infrastructure
- Business continuity solutions for avoiding downtime during planned maintenance or unplanned outages (including disaster recovery)
- Improved productivity by reducing the time needed to recover from disasters by automating tasks like failover and failback
- Support for AI workloads, including machine learning models that are often computationally intensive and difficult to replicate in a different environment
A Look at Data Loss and How Azure Site Recovery can Help
Imagine the following scenario: You are the CIO of a large organization with hundreds of employees and thousands of devices in your data center. Your IT team has been running regular backups for years.
They’ve been diligent about regularly testing those backups and ensuring they can restore them whenever necessary. If one day, you find out that one of your backup tapes was corrupted and can’t be used to restore data.
That situation might seem like an extreme example, but it does happen—and it could even happen to you! It’s essential to prepare for such events using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR).
ASR is a service that allows you to create DR plans for your applications so that if there is an unplanned outage at your primary site, you can activate ASR on your secondary site and recover from backups stored in Azure Blob Storage.
If a ransomware attack took down part or all of your network infrastructure, there would still be no need to panic. This is because ASR could help get things back up on running servers quickly so users wouldn’t notice any downtime or impact on their business processes!
How to Configure Azure Site Recovery?
The first step is to create a Recovery Services vault in your Azure subscription. After creating a Recovery Services vault, you can plan and configure disaster recovery for protected workloads.
You can also use the Recovery Services vault to store backup data from protected instances of applications and services.
To get started, you need to create an Azure resource group with a location that matches the one where your protected servers are deployed. Next, you must deploy an agent on each protected server or virtual machine (VM).
The installation process will automatically configure all necessary settings on-premises and in Azure so that when it comes time for DR testing or actual failover, everything should work as expected!
While Azure Site Recovery is a valuable tool for DR scenarios, it should not be considered a replacement for Azure Backup. The latter offers granular restores of specific data, which you may need in case of accidental deletion or migration to another region where the user has no control over how much you will transfer data.
Microsoft recommends using both services: Azure Site Recovery for data loss scenarios and Azure Backup for frequent restores. This ensures that all critical systems are backed up regularly, whether running on-premises or in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.
Why Work with TMC in Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan
One of the biggest challenges businesses face when creating and maintaining a disaster recovery plan is that they don’t have the expertise to do so.
It certainly makes sense to hire an expert for this task, especially if your company has no IT staff members who are well-versed in security and data protection best practices.
At Technical Mentors Concepts (TMC), we can help you create a comprehensive disaster recovery plan using our managed services, including security auditing, network design, server virtualization, and migration services.
We can also guide you on how to test your new DRP during simulated disasters and ongoing support during real-life emergencies.
Takeaway
You can reduce your security risks if you work with Microsoft Azure Site Recovery and create a detailed plan for your recovery process. Security risks are a real threat, and using the Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery Service can help you recover data safely and quickly.
It’s also essential that you keep your backup system up-to-date to reflect any changes in the environment or architecture. With this in mind, it’s crucial to regularly test your DR plan to ensure that it works as expected in an actual disaster situation. If you’re interested in learning more about this or other IT Managed Services, we invite you to contact us at your convenience.
