When we think about data protection, we also need to think about protecting our backups. Azure has a great article that talks about malicious attacks and the damage they can do to your data and your backups. The article also talks about the data protection capabilities Azure has built into their backup solution. Natively, within the MyCloudIT management console, we give you the ability to back up the files within your deployment using the Azure Backup agent. We automate the install and configuration of the Azure storage and Backup agent. This means that you get all the capabilities Aruna talks about by leveraging our pre-created infrastructure and Azure Backup. We also have guidance on how you can use Azure Backup to back up the complete Virtual Machine, including the data. Both types of backups, file based, or VM based each provide their own value. File-based backups can take as many as 3 snapshots of your data each day. VM-based backups can only occur once per day.
When we think about data security, we need to ensure we are protecting our data from the proper scenarios. Are you looking for a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, long-term data retention, or both? Azure VM backups are a great DR solution because they can take a full image snapshot of your running infrastructure and are easy to restore if you must recover from a disaster scenario, or even a corrupt VM. File-Based backups are used when you need to retain multiple versions of your files, or even retain files that may eventually be deleted either intentionally, or accidentally. Consider the file that undergoes multiple changes, file-based backups allow you to retain up to three different versions of the file every day. This allows you to retrieve a prior version if needed. Click here to read more about backup vs disaster recovery.
A quick tip to keep in mind as you consider third-party solutions. There are some third-party backup solutions that try to combine the image-based backup with the File-Based backups. If you look at other backup solutions, just remember that Azure charges for data egress, or the amount of data copied out of Azure. So, if you use a third-party solution that copies data out of the Azure Region, you will have to account for the cost of the data egress as well as factoring in the cost of the third-party backup solution.
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Tags: Best Practices
