Backup to the cloud is a nebulous topic. From public clouds hosted by a handful of major players, to private clouds creating clusters of highly available storage within a company’s own data centers, to hybrids of the two and everything in between, the explosive growth of cloud data storage options has naturally led companies to want to back up their data to these same locations.

Built-in Azure Backup Solution
It would be fair to mention that Microsoft Azure also offers its own backup-related service called Azure Backup. This service does exactly what it is named after – creates backups of data and transfers them to the Azure cloud. It can work both as an Azure VM backup system and as an Azure backup on premise.

Azure Backup as a whole is not a particularly complicated system – it uses its own MARS (Microsoft Azure Recovery Services) agent to send data to an Azure Backup Service Vault. After that, this vault then connects to an actual Azure cloud storage account, ready to accept backups as soon as you’re done setting up a backup schedule.

The following step consists of figuring out the encryption settings – you can generate a random passphrase, or input your own. This passphrase is essential for any restoration process of yours. You also have to pick the location that your passphrase would be saved at. Clicking “Next” one final time concludes this half of the process.

Backup scheduling is the second part of this entire Azure Backup setup process, and this one is significantly smaller, too:
The first step here would be to launch the program we have previously installed (if it failed to launch automatically). In this program, you can see an entire panel of options on the right – pick “Schedule Backup” to begin.

The “Schedule Backup Wizard” menu has multiple steps that help you with figuring out what you want to back up, how often to perform backups, and so on. The first step is to pick the backup target.

Data retention (short-term and long-term) via Recovery Service vaults, and more.

However, Azure Backup Solutions is also not the perfect solution on the market, and far from being the only one that can backup data to Azure cloud storage. As such, we can present five best practices when it comes to picking a specific backup and recovery solution (Azure Backup is our current example):

Backup target. The entire plan that describes your backup and recovery efforts – your backup strategy – changes a lot depending on the backup target that you have chosen. There is a massive difference between backing up regular files and folders, and creating app-aware backups of specific instances of VMs. Other variations of backup targets are databases (Azure SQL database backups are one such example), services, all kinds of VMs, and more – and you should figure out if a backup solution supports your backup target before getting it.

Backup performance. Another significant part of any backup strategy is the recovery time – figuring out how much time you can spend on fixing a service or a server (RTO), or how much time you can work without a part of your data (RPO). Both of these depend on a massive number of factors, including backup time, data transfer time, highest possible bandwidth of your channel, and more.

Backup price. Pricing is also important when it comes to picking a cloud backup and recovery solution, since it is not uncommon for different service providers to implement different models when it comes to cloud storage space. For example, Azure Backup offers a pricing system that consists of two main components: a variable charge depending on the amount of storage used by the backup, and a flat charge depending on an instance size. As such, it is important to find out what model your backup service is using beforehand.

Recovery process. While Backup Access Database as a process is important, it is extremely careless to forget about one more part of this – the recovery process. And this part of the service can also vary quite a lot depending on your cloud backup service of choice. For example, Azure backup and recovery system offers you the ability to recover VMs, workloads, system states and individual files, it can also be used to monitor backups, generate reports, run simple diagnostics, and more.
In this context, we should also mention another similar service – Azure Site Recovery. It is another highly specific service that provides a comprehensive Microsoft Azure disaster recovery feature set for your data, including copying VMs, enabling failover, and so on.

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