In the ever-evolving multi-cloud landscape of enterprise IT, organizations face a multitude of challenges. Microsoft Azure's dominance in the cloud market is undeniable. As of 2023, it holds the second-largest share with nearly 25%. Azure VMs, the backbone of many organizations' workloads, have seen exponential adoption. In fact, 95% of Fortune 500 companies have embraced Azure Cloud Services.
However, despite its popularity, Azure’s native Backup service comes with its fair share of challenges. Managing expenses and ensuring data security across clouds and apps rank among the top concerns of organizations today. The complexities of Azure's pricing structure often lead to unforeseen costs and operational overhead. Furthermore, Azure backup lacks critical air-gapped protection and ransomware safeguards, leaving organizations vulnerable to data breaches and loss. The limitations don't stop there. No deduplication means companies often face ballooning storage costs and weaker operational efficiency. Managing and maintaining backups in a multi-cloud environment is often unwieldy and cross-region restoration capabilities are limited, restricting flexibility in disaster recovery scenarios. Clearly, a more advanced alternative is needed.
In this blog, we'll take a deep dive into the challenges and limitations of the native Azure Backup service and introduce you to a game-changing solution from Druva that promises simplicity, security, and cost savings for your multi-cloud data — adding Azure protection to our industry-best portfolio of solutions for AWS, SaaS apps, and more.
The Challenge: Azure Backup's Limitations
While the native Azure Backup service offers a range of capabilities like offloading on-premises resources to the cloud and unlimited data transfer, it’s perhaps more known for its shortcomings. One of the most pressing issues is its costliness and complexity. Organizations often find themselves navigating intricate pricing structures, resulting in unexpected expenses and operational overhead. But cost is just one aspect of the problem.
The Azure Backup service’s vulnerability to modern cyber threats is a cause for concern. It lacks air-gapped protection and ransomware safeguards, leaving businesses exposed to threats. As ransomware grows in frequency and severity, this omission becomes increasingly glaring.
Managing data across multiple diverse on-premises and cloud environments adds another layer of complexity. In today's world, where multi-cloud strategies are commonplace, Azure backup's limitations are acutely felt. It lacks deduplication, leading to inflated storage costs and decreased efficiency. Complex management and maintenance workflows can become unwieldy over time, undermining IT team efficiency. Cross-region restoration is also restricted to specific replication types, limiting flexibility in disaster recovery scenarios.
In essence, Azure backup falls short of meeting the evolving needs of modern enterprises, calling for a more advanced and encompassing alternative.
The Solution: Boost Your Multi-Cloud Protection with Azure VM Backup and Recovery
Druva steps into this landscape and further enhances our multi-cloud portfolio with a game-changing solution for Azure VMs. Our agentless, 100% SaaS offering simplifies and secures Azure VM backup and recovery while reducing storage costs by up to 40% compared to the Azure Backup service. And the best part? New and existing customers can secure 50 VMs in Druva absolutely free for 6 months!
Security
Air-gapped Backups to Druva Cloud: Druva's solution protects your data from ransomware by creating an offline, inaccessible backup copy stored securely in Druva’s cloud. This ensures that even in the chaos of a ransomware attack, your data remains inaccessible to threats and recoverable in just a click.
Cross-Cloud Backup Redundancy (AWS-based storage): Druva takes your data's security a step further by replicating it across the AWS cloud, providing resilience against security breaches, natural disasters, or human errors in the Azure environment. Even if your Azure credentials are compromised, your data in Druva's Cloud remains shielded.
Cross-Region/Subscription Restores: Recover Azure VMs and their associated disk storage to your preferred Azure subscription and region effortlessly.
Simplicity
Agentless Protection: Druva eliminates the need to install an agent for native Azure VMs or disk protection. We manage all worker instances, ensuring end-to-end backup protection without installation hassles.
Discover Azure VMs Across Subscriptions: Druva empowers you to securely onboard Azure subscriptions, swiftly discover Azure VMs and managed disks, and create rules based on your organization’s SLAs.
Multi-Cloud Management: Enjoy centralized management of backup and restore operations across Azure, AWS, on-premises data centers, and SaaS applications, streamlining your data protection strategy.
Cost Savings
Lower Storage Costs: Druva customers can slash their backup storage costs by 50% or more with our best-in-class deduplication and by leveraging the Druva Cloud to eliminate the need for costly Azure backup redundancy storage, such as GRS and RA-GRS.
No Egress Costs: With Druva, you won't incur egress costs for backing up cross-region from Azure to the Druva Cloud. We manage the cloud ecosystem within our environment, sparing you unnecessary expenses.
Next Steps
As Azure's prominence in the cloud market continues to grow, so does the need for a robust, secure, and cost-effective backup solution. Druva's Azure VM backup and recovery solution is more than just an alternative; it's a transformative leap forward in data protection and management.
Say goodbye to the limitations of native Azure and embrace a future where your data is always secure, accessible, and cost-efficient. With air-gapped security, cross-cloud redundancy, simplicity in management, and substantial cost savings, Druva is poised to transform the way you protect and manage your multi-cloud data.
Data is the lifeblood of your organization — embrace the future of data protection with Druva — your Azure VMs deserve nothing less. Check out our Azure Product Tour today, or read the solution brief and tipsheet to learn more. Reach out to Druva Sales to discuss our limited-time offer! New and existing customers back up and secure 50 Azure VMs in Druva cost-free for 6 months.