Microsoft Launches New Azure Backup And Recovery Services

Microsoft today announced new features (in preview) for its Azure Backup service. In addition, the company is launching new functionality for its Azure Site Recovery service into preview.

The company is clearly gearing both of these services toward enterprises and notes that they will be especially interesting to companies making the move to hybrid cloud deployments. Using Azure Backup, businesses can ensure they SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, Windows clients and Hyper-V virtual machines applications are always backed up. Right now, the focus of this service is on machines that are hosted on premise, but Microsoft is also making a preview of Azure Backup available for data that resides in a company’s existing data center.

Similarly, enterprises can use Site Recovery to protect their VMware virtual machines and servers on Azure. The service allows businesses to remote monitor the health of their machines and create customizable recovery plans. Virtual machines — almost by default — are meant to be easily replicable.

The difference here is that the focus of Microsoft’s service isn’t so much on individual machines or small VM deployments, but on enterprise-scale data centers.

Should anything happen to your primary data center, Site Recovery ensures that you can quickly failback to your on-premise infrastructure. Microsoft notes that enterprises can also use this service to test new versions of their applications and then use the failback center to push them into production.

Because it’s that kind of day for Microsoft, the company is also taking its Azure API Management Premium service out of preview and officially launching a couple of enhancements to Azure Active Directory, including password rollover and per-app multifactor authentication.