BCDR: Azure Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Strategy Help To Improve Business Resilience

8 min readSep 7, 2021

The Difficulties in a Tech-First World

There is no space for guessing when it comes to protecting against infrastructure failure. Without a robust, planned disaster recovery strategy, even the slightest interruption can cause major — or even catastrophic — problems. Most businesses rely on technology to simplify and accelerate processes, and they want their digital investments to provide economic value. Today, a company’s viability and success are determined by the availability of its data. However, since we now rely so much on technology, the cost of unanticipated downtime has increased dramatically. According to the average research study, one minute of data center outage costs businesses $9,000 per minute. ¹ This figure covers the cost of restoring mission-critical data and equipment, the impact of missed employee productivity, and the legal and regulatory consequences.

However, corporations are not the only ones that stand to suffer if there is an outage. Other consequences, such as decreased trust among stakeholders and consumers, are more difficult to measure but nonetheless affect a brand’s identity, eroding credibility and dulling the competitive edge. Some businesses buy resources such as additional data centers, hardware, software, or even personnel to prevent disruptions and reduce their economic consequences. These improvements, however, are not only pricey, but they may also add unnecessary complexity to corporate processes and make it more difficult to keep safe. Businesses want smarter, more integrated disaster recovery solutions, such as Microsoft Azure. Azure’s cloud and hybrid deployment options provide a straightforward, cost-effective, and flexible method for businesses to reduce or even avoid the harm caused by an outage. Businesses may utilise their complete disaster recovery tools to secure data, schedule backups, and establish company-wide policies.

In today’s fast-paced corporate environment, when downtime is frowned upon, a single human error, cyberattack, or natural calamity might put your company to a halt. Having a thorough business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) response strategy is critical for business resilience and your organization’s survival.

BCDR: A Modern Solution

With Azure, you have the potential to assist your customers in mitigating risk and avoiding costly interruptions. Backup and Site Recovery are two essential Azure services that work together to offer a strong business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution for a hybrid IT environment. Customers can utilise these services to protect themselves from outages, natural catastrophes, and other large-scale failures. Customers will not need to purchase supplementary backups since, with Azure, they can minimise disruptions and be certain that their data is always safe and available. Customers, however, are not the only ones who gain. When you work with Platingnum, we will help you optimise your profits with attractive Azure products. You’ll get round-the-clock technical support, access to top-tier Azure engineers, and a dedicated staff to handle all of your sales and licencing inquiries. And, thanks to our low pricing, you’ll be able to save consumers hundreds of pounds while increasing revenue.
Let’s take a deeper look at the consequences of disruptions and how Azure BCDR services can assist.

What Is the Connection Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical components of a company’s overall risk management strategy. A business continuity strategy would be worthless without a disaster recovery plan, and disaster recovery alone does not assure company continuation. To reduce the business effect of a possible disaster, both BC and DR strategies must collaborate.

A solid business continuity strategy guarantees that mission-critical operations continue uninterrupted in the event of a disaster, and it necessitates a disaster recovery plan that assures all IT systems, software, and applications are accessible and recoverable. Both business continuity and disaster recovery are critical because they give precise processes and plans for how a firm will restart operations following a catastrophe.

Objectives of BCDR Planning

The primary aim of BCDR planning is not only to offer data recovery, but also to reduce the impact of a catastrophe on business operations and enable an organisation to swiftly return to normalcy in the aftermath of a disaster.

The following are five objectives that you may utilise to strengthen your BCDR strategies.

Assess the present condition of an organisation: Assessing the current state of an organisation may assist in identifying dangers and setting priorities for repair activities. The strategy should be revised on a regular basis to account for changes in items like personnel or systems.
Find flaws and provide solutions: The risks should be assessed on a regular basis to detect any gaps that might interrupt business operations and compromise BCDR plans. It is critical to recognise hazards and fill gaps discovered during frequent assessments of the BCDR plan.
Review and test the plan: At least once a year, review the BCDR plan to verify it is up to date and includes all elements of the company for quick recovery. There are several methods for testing your strategy, ranging from tabletop simulations to full cut-over. Depending on your context and available resources, you may utilise one or several testing methodologies over the course of your review.
Identify data storage location: One of the most important goals of BCDR planning is to determine where vital company data and assets are kept. This allows disaster recovery people to begin the recovery process even if the designated IT professionals are not present.
Understand the disaster recovery teams: Another key aim of a BCDR strategy is to understand recovery people, their duties, and how to contact them during an emergency. Communicate roles and responsibilities to all important stakeholders, and maintain this material accessible and up to date for workers.

Business worth of protective services

Azure BCDR can decrease the chances of an outage to negligible levels. It also has additional benefits, including compliance and operational support, as well as almost infinite scalability. Take a look at some of the advantages available to your customers.

Cost Savings

There is no need to acquire extra hardware.
There are no additional site resource charges.
Pay-as-you-go pricing model

Reduced Complication

Streamlining the onboarding process with cloud services
Execution simplified for testing and failover
Business Continuity Integration as a service

BCDR Features

Safeguard all of your critical IT systems.

Affordably. Simple and cost-effectively achieve low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) objectives for all main systems in your organisation. With a cloud-based data recovery solution intended for corporate purposes, you can avoid the bother and cost of additional data centres and access almost limitless capacity at a moment’s notice.

Data management, security, and protection will all be unified.

Achieve corporate objectives for application continuity and compliance throughout the application’s lifespan. Encryption features provide industry-leading protection for your data. Operations Management Suite, which combines centralised management, integrated data protection, and application availability solutions, can help you manage and secure your applications.

Ensure that apps function properly when you need them the most.

During an outage or catastrophe scenario, you may have peace of mind knowing that your disaster recovery solution protects and natively supports the most business apps of any cloud disaster recovery provider. Failover your applications — and your whole data centre — in hours rather than weeks or months using automated recovery strategies.

Tests can be performed at any moment to provide total assurance.

When a crisis strikes, the last thing you want to do is encounter a difficulty. When you need to test your business continuity plans or run dev-test copies of production workloads in Azure, you can do so without disrupting users. Furthermore, test new versions of apps with live data copies, and then easily deploy the new version to production in your data centre.

Why should you utilise Azure Site Recovery?

Reduce the complexity of your BCDR approach.

Site Recovery simplifies the replication, failover, and recovery of various business workloads and applications from a single point. It orchestrates replication and failover but has no access to or knowledge of your application data.

Allow for flexible replication.

Workloads operating on Hyper-V virtual machines, VMware virtual machines, and Windows/Linux physical servers may be replicated using Azure Site Recovery.

Simple failover and recovery

It supports disaster recovery exercises by providing test failovers that do not disrupt production settings. You may also do scheduled failovers with zero data loss for predicted outages, as well as unplanned failovers with little data loss for unanticipated calamities. You can fail back to your principal sites after failover.

Remove the secondary data centre.

You have the option of replicating to a separate on-premises location or to Azure. Using Azure as a disaster recovery destination reduces the expense and complexity of establishing a backup site, and duplicated data is kept in Azure Storage, which delivers all of the resilience that affords.

Combine with existing BCDR technology.

Azure Site Recovery works in collaboration with other application BCDR capabilities. Site Recovery, for example, may be used to safeguard the SQL Server back end of corporate workloads, providing native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn to manage availability group failover.

What is the strategy for Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Site Recovery can be used deployed to arrange replication in a variety of scenarios, including:

Replicate VMware virtual machines

VMware virtual machines on-premises may be replicated to Azure or a separate data centre.

Replicate physical machines

Physical devices should be replicated Physical computers running Windows or Linux can be replicated to Azure or a separate datacenter.

Replicate Hyper-V virtual machines in System Center VMM clouds.

On-premises Hyper-V virtual machines in a VMM system can be replicated to Azure or a secondary data centre.

Replicate Hyper-V virtual machines (without VMM)

Hyper-V VMs that are not controlled by VMM can be replicated to Azure.

VM Migration

Site Recovery may be used to move Azure IaaS VMs across regions or AWS Windows instances to Azure IaaS VMs. Only migration is now supported, which means you may failover these VMs but not fail them back.

Azure Backup

Azure Backup is a low-cost, scalable solution for cloud data backup. Customers may utilise Azure Backup to safeguard data stored on-premises or in the cloud. Provides a consistent, dependable, and readily available service. Scalability is quick and simple — scale up or down as needed. Builds on Microsoft’s reputation as a trustworthy counsel. There are no hardware or backup media charges, and there are no restoration costs.

Backup and archiving on the cloud is simple and inexpensive.
Benefits included:

Provides a consistent, dependable, and readily available service.
Scalability is quick and simple — scale up or down as needed.
Builds on Microsoft’s reputation as a trustworthy counsel.
There are no hardware or backup media charges, and there are no restoration costs.

Platingnum can help you increase the resilience of your business.

Being able to properly deal with any crisis may have a beneficial influence on consumers and partners. Developing a comprehensive BCDR plan, on the other hand, might be difficult due to its complexity or a lack of in-house knowledge. Platingnum can assist your company in achieving resilience and preparing for unanticipated disruptive occurrences.

Platingnum boosts uptime, productivity, and confidence, allowing you to accomplish more with less. Our all-in-one backup appliances simplify data protection, application spin-up, and SLA policy, and easily interact with the cloud, offering long-term retention and rapid disaster recovery.