Soft delete for virtual machines in Azure Backup
Published date: August 29, 2019
Concerns about security issues, like malware, ransomware, and intrusion, are increasing. These security issues can be costly, in terms of both money and data. Hence, there is a strong need to protect production as well as backup data against sophisticated attacks and have a strong security strategy in place to ensure data recoverability. It’s rightly said, Secure your backups, not just your data.
Azure Backup’s security features are built on three principles – Prevention, Alerting and Recovery – to enable organizations increase preparedness against attacks and equip them with a robust backup solution. Starting with multi factor authentication to sending email alerts for any critical operation, we now provide soft delete capability to protect cloud backups for IaaS virtual machines from accidental as well as malicious deletion of backups.
Key features
- 14 days extended retention of data. With soft delete, even if a user deletes the backup (all the recovery points) of a VM, the backup data is retained for 14 additional days, allowing the recovery with no data loss.
- Native built-in protection at no additional cost. The backup data protection with soft delete is offered at no additional cost. This security feature is natively built-in for all the recovery services vaults.
- Intuitive recovery of 'soft deleted' data. Recover soft deleted backup items using an ‘Undelete’ operation, and then restore them to any recovery point that existed before the deletion.
The different steps and states of a backup item are explained below:
Soft delete functionality is also coming soon for other cloud workloads.
Learn more about soft delete and read the Azure Backup documentation.
For additional support, reach out to the Azure Backup forum.
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