Microsoft Azure allows you to harness true industry leading IaaS offerings, allowing you to achieve hybrid consistency on-premises. We want you to be able to achieve consistency even in protecting your applications, no matter where they run. In line with this vision, we recently announced general availability of backup of IaaS VMs. Powered by Azure Backup with a PaaS model of service delivery, this enables you to seamlessly protect your applications while not having to worry about upkeep, running various legacy backup software in the cloud or other associated management challenges.

As it was in your private cloud, it is still prudent to back up your IaaS VMs running in Azure. While Azure provides multiple levels of redundant storage, it cannot prevent your applications from writing corrupt data or even simple human errors (“fat finger” deletes). If you haven’t started using this capability already, the video below will help you learn how do to do so in just over five minutes. It is incredibly simple to get started. However, simplicity does not mean you have to forego reliability. Azure Backup is an enterprise grade offering with an SLA of 99.9% availability of service.

In three simple steps you'll be able to back up your applications. First, you'll discover virtual machines. Second, you'll register them to a backup vault and third, you'll protect them. Restoring is as easy as navigating back to the vault, selecting the virtual machine and a recovery point, then hitting the restore button. Also, protection is consistent across all enterprise applications since it is policy driven.

Azure Backup, which powers this scenario, is available as part of the Operations Management Suite or as a stand-alone service offering.