Azure Backup Review

When an outage or a breach strikes your company, you must be able to recover your data fast or every area of your business could suffer catastrophic losses. Unfortunately, downtime following data breaches has grown increasingly costly in the last couple of years, primarily because the recovery period following data breaches has become longer and more complex. In fact, because of the sophistication of modern cyberattacks, the average time of recovery following a data breach has skyrocketed to over 100 days. Imagine how much your business would be impacted if you had no access to critical data during this recovery period. Fortunately, cloud backup solutions like Azure Backup offer a unique solution to this problem by helping you restore access to critical data and systems quickly following a data breach or outage. In this Azure Backup review, we’ll take a deeper look at what this service is, the benefits it provides, and the potential limitations you may encounter when using it.

Understanding Azure Backup

Azure Backup is a service native to Azure that provides simple, secure, and cost-effective solutions that allow you to back up your data and recover it from the Microsoft Azure cloud. Azure Backup can help protect your mission-critical workloads running in the cloud, ensuring that your backups are secure, available, and recoverable at scale. While a single outage could bring your business to a standstill for days (or even weeks), which could result in lost opportunities, customer trust, revenue, and much more, Azure cloud backup can help prevent this by ensuring that your organization can quickly recover lost data and continue business operations.

While Azure Backup can be extremely helpful in mitigating the potential fallout of a data breach, it is important that you understand its limitations and capabilities before deciding whether this is the right backup solution for your company. Keep reading as we take a look at some of the benefits and drawbacks of choosing Azure Backup for your data recovery needs.

Benefits of Azure Backup

Considering how devastating downtime can be following an outage or data breach, it is important that your organization has an effective disaster recovery plan in place to help you get back on your feet as quickly as possible. One of the biggest components of a disaster recovery plan is quality data backups that can help you quickly regain access to critical systems following an outage or data breach. To help facilitate a smooth backup and recovery process, you may want to consider investing in Azure Backup, as this solution can provide many benefits including:

Reduced IT Workload

Azure Backup fortifies your data protection strategy without putting extra work on your IT team.

With user self-service features, employees can take care of some backup and restore tasks without the need for IT support. Furthermore, Azure Backup even allows you to automate the backup process by scheduling backups to occur at regular intervals. This reduces your IT team’s workload while also ensuring that your backups are always up-to-date.

Enhanced Data Security

When you choose Azure Backup, you gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected against bad actor attacks, as Azure Backup utilizes some of the most powerful security features to protect your data. Data stored in Azure’s cloud environment is encrypted both in transit and at rest, providing enhanced security to better protect your data and business systems against data breaches. You can also rest assured that your data will be available to you when you need it most, as Azure’s servers are geo-redundant, ensuring that even if the servers go down in a single location, your data will still be accessible on another server. This provides enhanced reliability and redundancy compared to physical backups.

Possible Cost Reductions

Azure only charges for compressed backups and per GB each month, making it highly affordable and customizable to your business needs. Azure provides flexible pricing tiers that help optimize backup costs based on your organization’s data storage requirements, which can save you money as you will only be charged for what you use.

Scalability

Leveraging the power of the Azure cloud environment also makes it easier for your organization to scale the types and quantity of backups you use. You can scale your backups immediately based on your current data needs without the need to first invest in additional infrastructure or monitoring.

Reduced Physical Infrastructure Costs

Azure Backup replaces your existing on-premises or off-site backup solution, so you don’t have to front the capital expenditure for on-premises storage devices. This can help save you money over time, as you will no longer have to purchase and maintain complex physical backup solutions.

Easy and Granular Data Backups

With Azure Backup, you can back up encrypted, compressed and compressed/sparse files and folders. The Azure portal lets you easily manage your backup infrastructure from one location and choose specific files or folders to recover. Azure also enables users to customize specific backup schedules and select different levels of cloud protection for each machine — enabling further customization.

Limitations of Azure Backup

Of course, as with any business solution, Azure Backup is not without its limitations. It is then important that you consider these limitations before committing to Azure Backup so that you can make an informed decision. Some of the limitations this software has include:

The Potential for Unpredictable Costs

As we previously mentioned, with Azure Backup you only pay for what you use. While this can potentially provide savings, it can also make it hard to predict your monthly costs. Add to this that Microsoft Azure services come with variable per-incident charges, and it can quickly become difficult to forecast the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Azure Backup.

A Steep Learning Curve

While Azure Backup is user-friendly when it comes to basic backups, complex configurations with multiple workloads and intricate retention policies may require advanced technical knowledge. Unless someone on your team has experience working with the Azure environment, there may be a steep learning curve when adopting Azure Backup. Fortunately, working with an experienced managed service provider (MSP) can negate this problem, as your backup solution will be managed by an experienced team of IT professionals.

Vendor Lock-In

One of the biggest limitations of choosing Azure Backup is that it is designed primarily for Azure workloads. This means that Azure Backup cannot move data to a separate cloud environment, and you may need additional software if you want to use other cloud solutions.

Despite these limitations, many organizations still find Azure Backup to be an effective solution due to its security, flexibility, and ability to help organizations facilitate enhanced disaster recovery.

Contact Agile IT to Learn More About Azure Backup

Your business is built on innovation, resilience, and the ability to overcome challenges. Securing your data with a reliable backup solution is the next step in your journey to safeguarding your operations and ensuring continuity, no matter what comes your way. With Azure Backup, you gain the power to protect your data and recover quickly, minimizing downtime and ensuring a swift return to business as usual after an outage or server failure.

By choosing Agile IT’s Azure Backup and Recovery services, you take control of your disaster recovery plan while freeing yourself to focus on what you do best—growing and leading your organization. Our experienced team works alongside you to manage the backup and restore process seamlessly, giving you peace of mind and the confidence that your data is secure and ready when you need it most.

Are you ready to lead your organization into a secure and resilient future? Connect with us today and let us help you write the next chapter of your success story with Azure Backup and our award-winning services.