Microsoft Adds Azure Backup to Azure Government Cloud

Microsoft this week announced backup of government client’s Azure IaaS Virtual Machines using Azure Backup. This new feature will help a number of government customers in state, local, federal, civilian, defense, and over a hundred solution partners with dedicated government practices to leverage the cloud for critical business needs by backing up their assets on Microsoft’s cloud servers. This is in addition to Microsoft’s Azure Backup Server, which is a feature of Azure Backup that protects 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.

Microsoft describes its Backup of Azure IaaS VM as:

providing 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.

and Azure Backup server as:

enabling 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.

For existing Azure Backup users, you have to 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.

You can click here for videos of these features on the Microsoft site.