Our primary goal with Azure Backup has been to make it so simple and cost effective for our customers that the Cloud becomes their preferred backup target. It has also been our aim to make cloud backup widely available across geographies and workloads. In line with our vision, we are excited to announce that Azure Backup is now available in Australia and China. Enterprise customers in Australia and China can now leverage Azure Backup in an efficient manner to solve some of the most vexing backup problems facing large customers everywhere.

These problems include backup of remote branch offices, and establishing offsite locations for long term retention. The new Azure data centers in Australia and China, along with the Azure Backup service, can act as the backup target. You will no longer need to think about building offsite data centers- investing heavily in infrastructure to cover large distances. Azure has you covered!

This post will examine two of these scenarios and the capabilities.

Branch Office Backups

Branch office backups today are mired with complexities. Remote branch offices seldom have sophisticated on-premises backup capabilities. This is because traditional on-site backup solutions tend to be expensive and geared towards large data centers. Paucity of resources at remote branch offices is another reason why enterprises find it hard to equip them.

Enterprises often use their virtual private networks to back up critical data in branch offices to their central office. This typically results in a lower coverage of backup across branch office workloads and increased costs for the workloads protected. Often, many workloads in branch offices are left unprotected due to costs and the complexity of protecting them.

Azure Backup enables enterprise customers to solve this problem by directly backing up their remote branch office workloads to the cloud. Remote branch offices can make use of capabilities such as bandwidth throttling, compression and scheduled backup to effectively make use of their resources. Branch offices can also recover data with no intervention from the central office. Customers can get started with this solution in three simple steps.

Long Term Retention

Long term retention of backup data is an expensive proposition for enterprises today. Long term retention is often relegated to tapes. While tape media itself is inexpensive, the total cost of ownership of a tape based backup solution is much higher than a cloud based solution due to “soft” costs and complexities. This fact has been corroborated by analysts.

Enterprises are increasingly turning to the cloud to meet their long term retention needs. As discussed in the post Introducing Long Term Retention for DPM Azure cloud backups, Azure Backup along with System Center Data protection Manager help enterprises solve this problem elegantly.

Along with the System Center Data Protection Manager, enterprises can protect a myriad range of workloads for long term retention in Azure for a fraction of the total cost as compared to a tape based solution.

For instance, enterprises can leverage SC-DPM’s cutting edge private cloud protection capabilities to protect their private cloud, while seamlessly extending to Azure for long term protection of these assets.

Additional Resources

Now that you’ve learned how incredibly easy it is to back up your data to the cloud, learn more about System Center Data Protection Manager and try out the Azure Backup service!

• Learn more about Azure Backup and System Center Data Protection Manager.
• Don’t have an Azure Subscription? Make use of the Free Trial.
• Need the Agent binary? Download the Azure Backup agent.
• Have feedback for us on how we can improve? Tell us at Azure Backup User Forums.
• Need help with troubleshooting? Ask us at Azure Backup Support Forums.