Azure Disaster Recovery

Mandated for quick operational bounce-backs & best business continuity!!!

As the good old saying goes, ‘….you don’t know when disaster will strike…’. it is beyond the control of even the most proactive enterprise managers and IT departments when a disaster strikes. Of course, it is well within the limits of IT to limit and control their reactions to the disaster, but not the actual damage already done. Whenever a catastrophe hits out, it is capable of jeopardizing even the very IT infrastructure and end-to-end networks of enterprises.

Mandated DR implementations for business stability

No wonder why successful enterprises of today have started looking at DR as an ideal solution for speedy restoration of mission critical operations. Leading organizations view DR as a wholesome investment to achieve business continuity, and not to mention the least – totally avoid the dreadful effects of recovery costs.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) – seamlessly maintain workload back-ups

Building back the best possible way!!!

World over, leading enterprises view Azure Site Recovery (ASR) as the ideal cloud based platform where they can continuously maintain their workloads, lest the worst occurs. Technocrats and businesses view ASR as the most stress-free, tranquil way to maintain end-to-end operational jobs, application and data backups on cloud. ASR replicate workloads from primary location (on-premise or Azure) to secondary site.

What if an outage happens?

Never mind, ASR failover will come to the rescue!!!

During outages all that the IT personnel will have to do is, just invoke the enterprise disaster recovery plan, furthering to which ASR will facilitate a failover to the secondary site. This means that the enterprise personnel can keep working on the fully-backed up secondary site until the primary site is up and running.

What are the types of infrastructure that azure protects?

Following are a few server types that azure protects:

• Windows / Linux servers and computers
• Physical servers
• VMware/Hyper-V

Some of the other protective features of azure include seamless integration with dynamics, share point, SQL server, active directory and exchange, as well as red hat and oracle SAP.

Azure site recovery benefits

• Continuous health monitoring and failover status
• Protection for the virtual machines and the physical server
• Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO – 60 min) within organizational limits
• Data reliability by using recovery points with application-consistent snapshots

Ameex’s experience in setting up an azure secondary data centre as part of a disaster recovery solution

What was the problem?

One of Ameex’s client is a major pharmaceutical enterprise head quartered in south central region and has operations spreads across the US. The company developed and deployed a set of applications on Azure cloud platform:

• Enabling it to streamline and optimize its pharmaceutical site operations
• Enabling it to centralize data

What were their challenges?

During recent azure services outage, system suffered a major unexpected downtime which resulted in disruption of company’s operation for more than 24 hours
The client did not have a DR solution in place
Ameex experts assisted in assessment of the system and undertook the following steps to achieve resiliency

Ameex Solution

• Ameex technocrats implemented secondary site in another geographical location
• All components of the applications were provisioned and running in both primary and secondary sites
• For deployment issues, Ameex experts configured a blue-green deployment plan                                        

Application details:

• PaaS: Azure web app, database, storage, application insights, Data Factory
• IaaS: Virtual machines

Key Takeaways

• Whenever failover happens, secondary site takes over thereby handling planned and unplanned outages better
• Improved BCP readiness as Ameex experts implemented mock drills for disaster recovery
• Better load balancing was achieved. Traffic goes to primary site, while the secondary waits on hot standby
• By implementing blue-green deployment plan, Ameex consultants ensured there is no outage because of deployment                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

To know more about Ameex, write to us analytics@ameexusa.com