We have seen a few customer cases where customers accidentally deleted Azure VMs or lose data within the VM. While Azure provides protection against infrastructure related failures, it can’t guard against user initiated actions such as accidental deletion or a bad patch installation on the guest OS. Azure Backup provides a capability to guard against accidental deletions and guest OS level corruption scenarios using its cloud-first approach to backup.  Although customers can configure backup either from Recovery Services vault or directly from VM management blade, we have seen customers missing backup configuration and thereby risk losing their critical data. Today, we are taking a step towards advising you to protect your VMs using Azure Advisor recommendations, which was made generally available last week. 
 
Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps optimize the use of Cloud. It analyzes your Azure usage and provides timely recommendations to help optimize and secure your deployments. It provides recommendations in four categories: High Availability, Security, Performance and Cost. With this announcement, Azure Advisor provides recommendations on virtual machines that are not backed up and will let you enable backup on those virtual machines with just a few clicks.

Value Proposition:

Periodic Recommendations – Advisor provides hourly recommendations for VMs that are not backed up so that you never miss backing up important VMs. You can also control the recommendations by snoozing them.

Seamless experience to backup – You can click on the recommendation and enable backup on VMs in-line by specifying the vault (where backups will be stored) and the backup policy (schedule of backups and retention of backup copies).

Freedom from infrastructure – With Azure Backup, you don’t need to provision any additional infrastructure.

Application consistent backup – Azure Backup provides application consistent backup for Windows and Linux without the need to shut down the virtual machine.

Related links and additional content

• Want more details? Check out Azure Backup documentation and Azure Advisor documentation
• New to Azure Backup and Azure Advisor, sign up for a free Azure trial subscription
• Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support
• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
• Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates