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Azure Site Recovery

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WHAT IS Azure Site Recovery?

Business continuity with Azure Site Recovery: Resiliency Against Disaster

Like other organizations, you have a business-critical production environment utilizing virtualization to maximize hardware resources. You have a number of important line-of- business application servers and supporting infrastructure servers (Active Directory, DNS) and a high-speed Internet connection. You also have an active Microsoft 365 subscription providing SaaS for file storage and email.

Likely, you have a Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan, or are at least thinking about one. But how fleshed out is it, really? Can you confidently say that you can today, right now, switch over to a secondary location with minimal loss of data, for your applications and workloads? Because let’s face it, you can’t really predict when a serious outage is going to happen. A lengthy power loss onsite infrastructure due to natural disaster, or many other unforeseen events can all result in serious downtime and loss of revenue without a comprehensive BCDR strategy like ASR.

BCDR without costly infrastructure

Microsoft Azure provides a cost-effective solution for BCDR, called Azure Site Recovery (ASR). With ASR, you use your existing Internet connection to replicate business-critical workloads from on-premises to Azure, via your virtual or physical servers. This isn’t just backup, we are talking 24/7 synchronization of data to Azure, providing you a near real-time copy of all your data in the event of a disaster. When not in use, the VMs that will host your production applications and data are kept offline, dramatically reducing costs.

Recovery How & When You Need It

With ASR you can also run a full Disaster Recovery drill, allowing for complete testing of recently replicated applications and data without impacting your production environment. You can also configure customized recovery plans, ensuring that applications with dependencies are automatically brought online in the proper order.

But

Failure to properly configure and deploy ASR can lead to an incomplete or failed recovery. This leaves your organization
more vulnerable than ever to disasters and extended outages. You don’t want a disaster to be the moment you find out your recovery plan didn’t work!

Let Us Handle It

Our Azure experts will properly deploy and help you fully test ASR, ensuring that your recovery environment contains usable, recent data. We will assist you with identifying the data and applications to be protected, continuous replication of that data, and perform a full test of the recovery environment to ensure it meets your needs. We can also help set up a secure connection to Azure, if that is needed.

Our experts will help properly deploy these technologies, ensuring that your business continuity disaster recovery plan is ready if you ever need it.

OUR APPROACH

Crossconnect’s comprehensive Azure Site Recovery approach

Our Azure Site Recovery Experts will:

Develop Objectives and Disaster Plan: Crossconnect wants to first understand where you are, and where you are trying to get to with BCDR. What are you most important workloads, and where do they reside? What dependencies do they have?

Utilize the ASR Deployment Planner: We will deploy the ASR Deployment Planner tool to enumerate your VM environment and get a sense of what would be involved with data replication Deploy onsite ASR tools: We will install and configure the small appliance VMs that ASR uses to enumerate and manage the data replication to Azure.

Configure Recovery Plans: Crossconnect will use the information gathered from the disaster plan to make sure that the recovery environment comes up in the proper order, with any needed dependencies established first.

Pilot Testing: before deploying the entire environment to Azure, we will begin by replicating and verifying recovery with a small sample workload. This minimizes costs, ensuring that the entire environment is not replicated until we have verified with you that it is functioning properly.

Protect Remainder of Environment: With the successful verification of the pilot workload, we enable replication of the other production systems in your environment.

Perform Disaster Recovery Drill: Once we have successfully replicated the rest of the on-premises infrastructure to Azure, we work with you to perform a DR drill, fully bringing up the recovery environment in Azure while keeping it separated from production. Then together with you we verify that recent data is available and applications are all functional.