We recently announced the Preview of Microsoft’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering, Azure Site Recovery, which enables automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery of virtualized workloads between private clouds across enterprise sites or directly in Microsoft Azure accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime.

Our customers are loving the simplicity and robustness of our offering and are benefitting from key capabilities that we built into the offering – At-Scale Configuration, Variable Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) that can be as low as 30 seconds, best-in-class Security and Encryption, Self-Service Disaster Recovery, and One-Click Orchestration using Recovery Plans

While Azure Site Recovery not only enables a low-cost, high-capability, CAPEX-saving, and OPEX-optimizing Disaster Recovery strategy for your IT Infrastructure, it can also help you quickly and easily spin-off additional development and testing environments or migrate on-premise virtual machines to Microsoft Azure.

For organizations that are adopting the Cloud as an important part of their IT strategy, Microsoft Azure, provides an open, broad and flexible platform on which applications can be developed using a broad set of operating systems, frameworks and languages: Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, .Net to Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, and Hadoop.

Customers that want a solution that enables migration of their existing on-premise virtualized workloads to Azure, most often look for three very important considerations when making the decision:

For customers who want a unified solution that meets the above criteria (and more), Azure Site Recovery with its in-built features can help make migrating to Azure simple, reliable, and quick. Here is how you would go about migrating an on-premise virtualized application to Azure:

With Test Failovers (DR Drills) and Network Mapping, you can test your entire application and network configuration without impacting your production workload. Not only does Test Failover allow you to scale your development and testing environments on-demand, it also ensures that you can validate your application’s functionality and its performance in Azure before making the final move.

With Recovery Plans that group virtual machines from multi-tiered applications into one consolidated failover unit, migrating to Azure is as simple as a click and benefits from the optimizations that we enable to reduce your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Recovery Plans also support Planned Failovers so that your on-premise workloads will be gracefully shutdown before getting failed over to Azure. At that point you can Disable Protection on the virtual machines and leave them running in Microsoft Azure. Detailed step-by-step instructions are available in the Azure Site Recovery documentation.

Delivered via the Microsoft Azure Portal, Azure Site Recovery provides a consistent, uniform, and simplified user-experience across private, partner, and public clouds making migrating to Azure a breeze.

For more information on Azure Site Recovery check out the recording of our session from TechEd 2014 where we announced the Preview. You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers.

Once you are ready to get started, check out additional product information, and sign-up for a free Azure trial to start migrating your virtualized workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery.

If you are already virtualized on Windows Server 2012 R2, Azure Site Recovery is an ideal choice to enable Disaster Recovery to Azure or effectively migrate your virtual machines to Azure. For our customers who want to migrate to Microsoft Azure their Physical or Pre-Windows Server 2012 R2 virtualized workloads running on any cloud, we will very soon enable a migration offering using our newly acquired technology from InMage.