Cloud Services Can Help with Data Center Protection

Microsoft offers several on-premises products and hosted services that provide flexible backup and disaster recovery solutions. Customers can use on-premises products and Azure services and technologies to back up on-premises data to the cloud to lower costs, protect against unwanted data removal, and insure against disasters. Microsoft continues to integrate solutions that provide additional options for data center backup and recovery, but the company is increasingly emphasizing backup solutions that depend on Azure.

Evaluating Backup and Disaster Recovery Options

Organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud or hybrid backup solutions for both backup and disaster recovery. Cloud solutions have many built-in advantages over on-premises solutions, such as geographical redundancy, replacement of on-premises hardware and software, and (potentially) lower cost and better security.

Backup is typically used to ensure that data is safe and recoverable if the data is accidentally deleted or becomes corrupted. Typical backup solutions (referred to as crash-consistent backups) capture all data at the same time but do not capture data in memory or any pending I/O or transactions. Application-consistent backup is more complicated, but it does capture in-memory data and pending transactions; application-consistent backup is usually required for database applications.