SA-ASR

Azure Backup & Site Recovery

Backup and disaster recovery built on Azure — with documented RPO and RTO objectives that your team has actually tested before they're needed.

What this is

Backup is straightforward. Recovery is hard. Most organizations have backup running, but very few have actually tested whether the recovery works at the scale and speed they would need during a real incident. We've seen organizations with perfect-looking backup reports who couldn't restore a single VM when ransomware hit.

Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery solve different parts of the problem. Backup is for restoring individual servers, files, and applications after corruption, deletion, or attack. Site Recovery is for failing over entire workloads to another region when the primary site is gone — fire, flood, prolonged outage, region-wide cloud failure.

We design both. We test both. The deliverable that matters most isn't the backup policy — it's the failover that worked when we ran it.

What you'll get

Azure Backup vaults configured with policies covering Azure VMs, on-premises servers via MARS or MABS agent, file shares, SQL databases, and Microsoft 365 if that's in scope. Retention sized to your compliance requirements without paying for years of storage you don't need.

Azure Site Recovery configured for the workloads tiered as business-critical, with replication tested and failover documented. Tier-2 workloads with backup-only protection. Tier-3 workloads on a documented restore-from-backup path.

And the part that almost always gets skipped — at least one documented, successful failover test. Your team running it, with us watching, before the engagement closes. So when something actually breaks, the team has done it once before.

How it goes

A · Tier
Classify workloads by criticality

Weeks 1–2. Inventory workloads. Interview business owners about acceptable downtime and acceptable data loss for each one. Tier the workloads — tier 1 needs near-real-time replication and quick failover, tier 2 needs daily backup with multi-hour restore, tier 3 needs weekly backup that takes a day to restore. Set RPO and RTO targets per tier.

B · Configure
Deploy backup and replication

Weeks 3–6. Deploy Recovery Services vaults. Configure backup policies per workload tier. Install MARS or MABS agents on on-premises servers. Set up Azure Site Recovery replication for tier-1 workloads. Validate that first backups complete and first replicas reach a healthy state.

C · Test
Run a failover drill

Weeks 7–10. Run a documented failover test for at least one tier-1 workload. Time it against the RTO target. Identify gaps. Fix what's broken. Hand over the DR runbook with a clear sequence of steps for each workload tier, then 30 days of hypercare.

Practical details

Duration
6–10 weeks, depending on workload count and tier-1 complexity
Delivery
On-site for failover drills, remote for backup configuration
Coverage
Azure VMs, on-premises servers, file shares, SQL, Microsoft 365
Output
Tested DR runbook with documented RPO/RTO per tier
Your side
Infrastructure lead and business owners for tier classification

If you want to talk through your situation — workload count, criticality levels, what you're backing up today — write to us.

+66 81 919 0291

We usually reply the same day.

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