Azure Disaster Recovery (DR): How Much is Your Business Really Worth?

Disaster Recovery in Azure 

Microsoft Azure offers a secure, scalable backup and disaster recovery solution. In Azure, disaster recovery means replicating data and applications from a primary region to a secondary one, so you can restore operations quickly if something goes wrong. 

It also works the other way: organisations can use Azure as a disaster recovery site for on-prem systems, keeping services running in the cloud if local infrastructure fails. 

Azure has more global regions than any other cloud provider – with a total of 60+ regions worldwide, available in more than 140 countries and 160+ data centres.  

As a result, it can offer the scale needed to bring applications closer to users around the world, preserving data residency, while also offering comprehensive compliance and resiliency options for customers.

And with Azure’s global infrastructure, organisations can build disaster recovery plans that meet their recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) targets to mitigate losses and maintain business continuity. 

Region Pairs

While Microsoft’s infrastructure is reliable, it’s possible that a disaster could cause an outage large enough to affect two data centres. That’s why Azure creates region pairs.

• Each Azure region is paired with another region within the same geography. 
• These regions are usually at least 300 miles apart.

Azure's region pairs are demonstrated below:

Since region pairs are directly connected and geographically isolated, they enable: 

• Reliable service continuity 
• Data redundancy 

Some services, like geo-redundant storage, automatically use region pairs. If a widespread outage occurs: 

• One region in each pair is prioritised for recovery 
• Azure updates are applied one region at a time within pairs, to minimise impact 

Azure Disaster Recovery Tools 

Azure offers great DR services like: 

• Geo-redundant storage 
• Azure Site Recovery 
• Azure Backup (automated backups) 

Azure Geo-redundancy

Geo-redundancy involves replicating your data and resources across multiple geographic regions to protect your environment from regional outages, disasters, or network issues. Azure offers the following technologies for geo-redundancy:

• Geo-redundant storage (GRS) copies your data to a secondary region;
• Geo-redundant traffic manager (GTM) routes your traffic to the best available endpoint in different regions
• Azure Site Recovery (ASR) 

What is Azure Site Recovery (ASR)? 

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides a strong disaster recoovery solution, offering near real-time failover of virtual machine workloads to an alternate Azure region. ASR isn’t limited to Azure-to-Azure protection. You can also use it to protect on-premises infrastructure, failing over to one or more Azure regions.  

For example: You might run production workloads in West Europe and use Azure Site Recovery to replicate virtual machines to North Europe. 

A major benefit of ASR is cost-efficiency. It works by continuously replicating VM snapshots to another region. But you don’t incur compute costs for the replica unless you initiate a failover. 

What is Azure Backup? 

Azure Backup is a cloud-native solution that helps you to protect data in both Azure and non-Azure environments. It is secure, simple and built for enterprise use. You can use it to protect Azure VMs, on-prem servers, databases like PostgreSQL and storage like managed disks and Azure Files. 

Azure Backup includes built-in replication options such as using geo-redundant storage (GRS) by default. This copies your data to a second region. You define your backup policies based on what you're protecting and how often backups run. Everything is consumption-based. 

In terms of security, all data is encrypted at rest and in transit. In addition, it includes ransomware protection with MFA, custom access controls, and multi-user authorisation. Even if a ransomware attack occurs and someone tries to delete your backups, Azure requires a passphrase. That is to say, the deletion won’t go through without it, keeping your backups stay protected even during attacks. 

Disaster Recovery Scenarios in Azure 

When it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), it starts with one basic question: where does your data reside? Is it in the cloud or on-prem? 

Scenario 1: Protecting workloads in Azure 

When you’re already in Azure, you can use various methods across a combination of Azure tools and services, application architecture and operational processes.  

Often, the first step you can take is to enable backups on your virtual machines. Azure Backup is highly scalable. The same is not true, however, for on-prem setups (often a lack of storage). Not only that, but Azure Backup is also great if you are hybrid cloud. Your workloads sitting on-prem as well as on cloud can benefit from a single solution with Azure Backup. 

For more advanced recovery scenarios, you can use Azure Site Recovery (ASR), Azure’s native solution. ASR lets you replicate Azure VMs from one region to another as failover location. That is to say, if your primary region is West Europe, it allows you to replicate to its paired region: North Europe. 

Scenario 2: Protecting workloads to Azure 

• If you run workloads on-prem without a DR site, you can also fall back on Azure to use it as a failover location rather than using another self-hosted data centre.  
• Or maybe you’re in the migration period, and you’ve got your on-premise data centre, which has a power outage. Then, you can use Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to replicate your on-prem sites (VMware, Hyper-V, or servers) to the cloud. 

ASR is consumption-based: you mainly pay for storage while data replicates, and only for compute and networking during failover.

From a high-level architecture, a scenario would look somewhat like this: 

• A heterogeneous environment with, on the left, your Hyper-V or VMware on-prem and on the right, your app servers, web servers, load balancers, and gateway. 
• Once you configure Azure Site Recovery, asynchronous replication happens, and a replica disk is created on the Azure site. 
• You can control and automate the order in which systems come back online (like e.g. first database servers, then web servers etc.). 
• Failover can be automated using Azure Traffic Manager or handled manually, depending on how you configure it. 
• Recovery typically takes 5 to 15 minutes, giving you a buffer to stabilise the on-prem environment.  

ASR is a straightforward solution to set up, it saves you costs, management work and in return, you also get built-in resilience.  

Best Practices for Disaster Recovery in Azure 

Design for failure 

Disaster recovery starts with architecture. You shouldn't just rely on a single region – instead, spread your workloads across regions and use natural region pairings in case one region goes down. 

Define your RTO and RPO clearly 

Every DR plan should define recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). These numbers set expectations on how fast you recover and how much data loss is acceptable.  

Use native Azure tools  

When building your DR plan, lean on native Azure services where you can. Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and built-in geo-redundancy for services like Azure SQL make it easier to implement reliable, integrated recovery strategies.  

Isolate your backups 

For stronger protection, create a separate tenant or subscription with different access rights. This isolation means if your primary environment is compromised – through data loss or ransomware – your backups are still safe. 

Know your service behaviour 

Not all Azure services handle DR the same way. For example, Azure SQL is natively redundant and includes automated backups. But if you run SQL inside a VM, you’ll need to manage high availability and backups yourself. Understand what’s managed by Azure and what you need to handle. 

Test regularly 

Don’t wait for a real outage to find out if your disaster recovery plan works. 

If something fails during a test, fix it, so it doesn’t break when it really matters. Testing gives you confidence, and it’s the only way to catch hidden issues before they become costly problems. 

You can run disaster recovery drills using ASR’s test functionality. This lets you validate your DR strategy and confirm that recovery will work when needed. 

Don’t treat DR like an afterthought  

Yes, disaster recovery has a cost. But so does losing your business for hours, days, or permanently. That’s why you can’t really put a price on it
 

Closing thoughts 

Whether preparing any doom scenario (like a data centre outage), or just aiming to protect your business and uptime, prioritising disaster recovery is a no-brainer. 

We’ve discussed the importance of spreading your workloads across multiple regions. So, if a failure might occur (such as a region outage or a data centre outage), let’s say in West Europe. Then, you need a plan to fail over to another region (region pair= North Europe) with minimal disruption. 

To round it off, disaster recovery, whether in or out of Azure, is more than just having the right tools. You must also have a strategic disaster recovery plan.