As part of our continued momentum with new capabilities on Microsoft Azure Government, we are excited to announce backup of your Azure IaaS VMs using Azure Backup. Protection of Azure IaaS VMs will help number of government customers in state and local, federal civilian and defense, plus over a hundred solution partners with dedicated government practices to leverage the cloud for critical business needs by backing up their assets on cloud.

We also enabled Microsoft Azure Backup server, a feature of Azure Backup to protect workloads to disk and cloud, for all Azure Government customers. Customers can leverage this Microsoft Azure Backup server to backup their key Microsoft workloads like SQL, SharePoint and Exchange to Azure.

Backup of Azure IaaS VM

Azure IaaS VM backup provides application consistent backups, with zero ongoing maintenance and infrastructure deployment for backup. Azure Backup transfers snapshots taken on a IaaS VM to a secure, reliable Azure Backup vault and can restore the VM in a single click.

Back up Azure IaaS VMs

Azure Backup server

Azure Backup server enables backup of Microsoft SQL Server, Hyper-V VMs, SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange and Windows Clients. Customers with tier 1 workloads like Microsoft SQL Server can benefit from Microsoft Azure Backup Server by choosing disk backups for better RPOs and RTOs. They can continue to backup to Azure for long-term retention using disk-disk-cloud backup strategy.

Azure Backup server overview

Steps to download Azure Backup server

Steps to install and register Azure Backup server

If you are an existing Azure Backup user, please start by creating an Azure Backup vault to back up Azure virtual machines and download Microsoft Azure Backup Server to get started with backup of enterprise applications.

If you are new to Azure, learn more about Azure Backup and click for a free Azure trial subscription.

FAQ

Q) What firewall rules should be configured for Azure Backup to communicate to Azure Gov?

A) Please make sure to enable your firewall to communicate to below URLs.

• www.msftncsi.com
• *.Microsoft.com
• *.WindowsAzure.us
• *.microsoftonline.com
• *.windows.net
• *.usgovcloudapi.net

Additional resources

• Azure Government cloud
• Cloud Computing terms
• Azure Backup
• Need help? Reach out to the Azure Backup forum for support.
• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and up-voting existing ones.