Windows Server SA Discounts Azure Disaster Recovery

A new Hybrid Use Benefit included with Software Assurance (SA) in Feb. 2016 entitles customers to run Windows Server in an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) and pay only for compute and infrastructure costs. Using Azure VMs for disaster recovery requires organizations to pay to run Windows Server on those VMs, in addition to paying for the compute time and other Azure charges. The new benefit could help customers build out disaster recovery or other hybrid use cases in Azure VMs, but there are caveats to the benefit, and it is available only for customers with SA on Windows Server.

Disaster Recovery to Azure Virtual Machines

Microsoft offers a broad range of technologies to enable disaster recovery scenarios in Azure, through Azure VMs. While some of these technologies can replicate to an Azure VM while the VM is offline, others require the VMs to be running and available in order to perform failover from the organization’s own hardware.

For larger organizations, Hybrid Use Benefit could enable more complex disaster recovery scenarios, including across geographical boundaries, without requiring the expense of building out their own infrastructure. For smaller organizations, Hybrid Use Benefit could enable more cost-effective disaster recovery scenarios without needing to find a secondary data center to host their systems.