Keeping businesses online and operational is a key concern, no matter the nature of your downtime. Most companies don’t focus on business continuity until it’s too late or have incomplete, untested barebones recovery plans. High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Backup are all critical to a complete business continuity solution. In a recent webinar, Senior Principal Architect Chris Seferlis discussed how leveraging Azure for disaster recovery and business continuity is the most effective way to ensure you’re protected.

If your business’s data is in the cloud, there is nothing is more pivotal than your cloud backup, recovery and migration procedures. Only 18% of decision makers feel fully prepared to recover their data center in the event of a site failure or disaster. The issues are out-of-date recovery plans and limited back-up and recovery testing.

Most disaster situations are caused by system failures, power failures, natural disasters and cyber-attacks. The challenges businesses face in disaster recovery are significant, including cost, complexity and reliability. To have a successful business continuity strategy, organizations must prioritize high availability, disaster recovery and data back-ups.

Disaster recovery is important; there is always a risk of failure with your data, including software bugs, hardware failure and human error. Important factors to consider are Recovery Time Objective (RTO); the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster; and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident. Both RTO and RPO are business decisions.

Azure can protect against planned and unplanned events by distributing the placement of VMs across the infrastructure. Azure also helps with Disaster Recovery through consistent backup for Windows Azure VMs and file-system backup for Linux Azure VMs. Additionally, it provides efficient and reliable backups to the cloud with no infrastructure maintenance.

Watch the full webinar here to gain more insight into:

• Azure Backup Server
• VMWare VM Backup
• Azure Site recovery
• Disaster Recovery for Hyper-V
• Azure Migration

Click here to view my slides from this presentation. If you’d like to learn more about business continuity using Azure or need help with any Azure project from discussions and planning to implementation, click the link below and talk to us today. We can help no matter where you are on your cloud journey.