Azure Backup – Protect Your Data With The Cloud
If you’re contemplating the Cloud, one of the easiest, cost effective ways to start is with Azure Backup. It’s reliable, scalable, requires no capital expenditure, and is inexpensive. Still using tape? Unreliable, expensive, and how often do we forget to store it offsite? There are other cloud based backup systems like Crashplan and Carbonite, but their business plans can be expensive and aren’t robust enough to backup VMs or integrate with System Center or other advanced tools.
Protecting your data with Azure Backup is easy:
- Setup an Azure subscription, if you don’t already have one.
- Setup a Backup vault in Azure.
- Install the free Azure Backup Agent on your on-premise server/s.
- Specify what to backup and create your schedule and retention rules.
That’s it, easy!
What does it cost?
Pricing is two pronged you pay a flat rate “instance” fee, typically $5 or $10 a month and then you pay for the storage which is as low as $0.024 per GB. The amount you pay for storage depends on how much space you’re using (only pay for what you use) and the redundancy of the storage. Here are some examples to give you a better idea.
| Primary Machine | Workload | Protected Size | Billed Amount |
| 1 Windows Host | Windows Server 2012 (Files/Folder backup) | 300GB | $10/month |
| ! Windows client machine | Windows 10 (Files/Folder backup) | 25GB | $5/month |
| 1 Hyper-V virtual machine | Virtual machine backup | 30GB | $5/month |
| 1 Azure IaaS virtual machine | Virtual machine backup | 250GB | $10/month |
| 1 Windows guest machine | Windows Server 2012 (Files/Folder backup | 120GB | $10/month |
| 1 Windows guest machine | Microsoft SQL Server standalone | 600GB | $20/month |
For more information on Azure Backup Pricing check this Azure page. You can save up to 80%, compared to tape, based on this Gartner Study.
The video below walks through the process of setting up your first backup.
You can check out more videos in the Azure Backup series on the Azure site.
Azure Backup is everything you need in a backup solution for your disaster recovery needs. It can backup cloud and on-premise resources. It’s automated, reliable, and secure. Check out this Azure Factsheet for more information.
If you’re already in the Azure Cloud or are contemplating the Cloud, Azure Backup just makes sense. Take a look at these resources and let us know if Unified Business Solutions can help you get your data safe and secure using Azure Backup.