Availability is not merely Disaster Recovery in the cloud, it’s the empowering connection between a datacenter and the cloud for protection and value creation. With today’s announcement, Microsoft provides comprehensive Availability on Demand in Azure for hybrid and heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to harness a near unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for dev/test, cloud bursting, migration, reporting/analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention.

Microsoft offers an unrivaled integration of on-premises assets with Azure in one unified solution, eliminating the hassle of managing multiple point solutions, and a mix of cloud providers. Whether an environment has Hyper-V, Physical (in preview) or VMware (in preview) assets, with Availability on Demand, the power of Azure is just a few clicks away. Merely connect your datacenter to Azure with Availability on Demand, and your data and applications will be available in Azure when needed.

• Eliminate the need to build and maintain a secondary DR site.
• Save time and money, by eliminating tape backup and house up to 99 years of backup data in Azure.
• Easily migrate running Hyper-V, Physical (in preview) and VMware (in preview) workloads into Azure to leverage the economics and elasticity of the cloud.
• Run compute intensive reports or analytics on a replicated copy of your on-premises asset in Azure, without impacting production workloads.
• Burst into the cloud and run on-premises workloads in Azure, with larger compute templates when needed, to give you the power you need, when you need it.
• Create multi-tier development environments in Azure with a few clicks – even replicate live production data to your dev/test environment to keep it in near real-time sync.

Availability on Demand provides a seamless connection between your on-premises production systems and Azure or a secondary site, leveraging the replication capabilities of Azure Site Recovery and the data protection of Azure Backup. With the ability to provide both on-premises support and connect to Azure and replicate Hyper-V and now Physical and VMware workloads (in preview), organizations can implement a true hybrid model, and take advantage of compelling cloud economics and elasticity.

To learn more visit the Availability on Demand home page.