5 Benefits of Using Azure Site Recovery for Disaster Recovery

When it comes to a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. While every organization’s security needs are different, there is one commonality: DR is not optional.

Too often companies assume they will never need to recover from a major event or that their current systems are protecting them. In the event of a disaster, or a compromised IT environment, not having an effective DR plan in place can have serious consequences. 

If your organization is looking for a cost-effective and dependable Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a great option.

With Azure Site Recovery, businesses can safely store and recover critical data right in the cloud. This solution amplifies DR by cutting time and costs while guaranteeing successful failover and failback capabilities in the event of a security threat. Also, if your business objectives or needs change, consumption can be scaled up or down quickly and efficiently.

What Are the Benefits of Azure Site Recovery?

1. Ease of Deployment.

Implementing an effective DR solution can be expensive, complicated to install, and require manual maintenance. By using a cloud-based approach to recovery, timely and costly requirements of maintaining on-premises hardware are eliminated. Azure Site Recovery is a straightforward approach for those who want to build a DR site in several hours, not several days of complicated software and replication strategies. 

2. Dependable Failover and Recovery.

With ASR, you can deploy replication, failover, and recovery processes to keep your applications running in the event of an outage and minimize recovery issues by sequencing the order of multi-tier applications running on multiple VMs. ASR provides recovery options for on-premises and virtual workloads.

According to Microsoft, ASR’s best-in-class Recovery Time Objective (RTO) can have your basic operations up and running anywhere between a few seconds to minutes. For the recovery of more complex applications, ASR has an RTO of as little as 30 minutes.

In our experience performing incident response, workloads would have been operational much faster if failover to Azure had been in place. 

3. Cost Effective.

It’s estimated that IT downtime costs businesses between $10,000 to $5 million per hour for the duration of the outage. With ASR, organizations can implement a failover process that is not cost-prohibitive and manageable.

When workloads are replicating to Azure cloud, you can reduce the cost of deploying, monitoring, patching, and maintaining an on-premises disaster recovery infrastructure by eliminating the need to build or maintain a costly secondary data center. These data centers come with an influx of costs, from lengthy contracts to expensive network links.

There are no long-term contracts for ASR, and the cost is based only on consumption. Unlike expensive secondary data centers, you will only pay for what you use. Azure’s consumption-based pricing combined with its scalability makes it a very cost-efficient option for organizations wishing to protect their data and operations via ASR for DR purposes.

4. Accessibility.

One requirement of any successful DR tool is accessibility. With ASR, you can replicate, recover, and conduct failover testing directly from the Azure portal. This allows a straightforward method of testing applications and services during a DR drill without impacting production workloads or end-users. 

ASR also reduces the complexities of the DR process with sequenced workflows that automatically run during failover. This means that in the event of a security threat, your data and backups will be safe, accessible, and easily recoverable.

5. Meet Compliance.

ASR allows you to easily comply with industry regulations such as ISO 27001 by enabling Site Recovery between separate Azure regions. You can meet compliance requirements like CMMC compliance by ensuring that all metadata that is needed to enable and orchestrate replication and failover remains within that region's geographic boundary. If your data requires an extra layer of protection for compliance reasons, encryption-in-transit and encryption-at-rest are supported with ASR. 

In today’s digital landscape, companies cannot afford to use outdated or underperforming business continuity technologies, let alone none at all. When you can depend on a disaster recovery plan to protect your data and environments, planned or unplanned outages become much less destructive.

In the event of a disaster, help your business keep doing business with Azure Site Recovery. We can set up, provision, and test ASR as well as establish recovery time objectives.