Item: Azure Backup
Rating: 9
Author: John Fester

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

If you have managed backups, then you know of all the sufferings you've dealt with, ranging from errors to insufficient storage, to permissions, checking consistency, deduplication, mounting backups to restore entire systems...or random files only. These routines cause significant stress and concern if you do not have your backups set up appropriately, or worse, use a system that does not give you these abilities. With Microsoft Azure in place, it only makes sense to use Azure Backup. The ability to directly tie a machine to a user, or backup media to a project or dataset, and easily deploy in your Microsoft network, is superb with Azure as opposed to other software that you will have to set up all of these items manually to finagle them to work properly. Being a Microsoft network, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Servers and Microsoft Exchange...adding Microsoft Azure is a clear recommended path and utilizing Azure for backups is a must in this type of environment.

Pros and Cons

Azure Backup is fast! Coupled with the fact that Microsoft created Azure and Windows - these two operate phenomenally together!
Administering the backups inside of Azure is a breeze. The ability to mount, restore entire backups, or recover files, has been made very easy. You do not have to download any media to recover something, you do this all in the cloud and it gets mounted in Microsoft's systems. Making this process less than a quarter of the time you would have spent with your 'other' backup solutions.

Having an admin console that you can use to manage backup schedules across your network would be useful. Going machine to machine to check the current settings is ok but would be better in a GUI.
Maybe an agent utility installed on each workstation where the user can specify or customize the backup, perhaps just a set of folders, or ignore certain folders, would be helpful to eliminate garbage in the cloud.

Return on Investment

Azure Backup has saved us approximately 23% of our annual cost for backups, by switching to them from Symantec Backup Exec. And keep in mind, my backups were not in the cloud before...saving money and more access and redundancy...YES!
We have not had a negative impact with using Azure, unless we consider a need to restore a system. In that case it would be the time to download the backup media from Azure Backup first as opposed to a local backup that you would already have in your hand. I view this as a benefit, not setback, because the backups are available anywhere in the world...not just your office.

Alternatives Considered

Veritas Backup Exec, Paragon Backup & Recovery, Seagate Cloud Disaster Recovery Service, Carbonite Server Backup and Carbonite Recover

Azure Backup is based on the most secure and encrypted cloud storage facility available...Microsoft. They have been doing this a long time and have ironed out all the kinks, leaving only the good and dependable solution in place. Azure Backup is fast also, you do not have major delays and internet throttling happening from Microsoft, unlike nearly all other competitors. Have you ever tried downloading a backup you have in the cloud from any solution other than Microsoft Azure Backup? If you have, you know they throttle the speed drastically and it could take you more than an hour to restore just 100mb of data. Most server backups are over 50 GB, some of mine are over 1.5 TB. With those slow speeds it could take weeks to recover your system just because you are waiting on the download to finish. Those companies then offer to send you an external drive with your data on it...but for a major price tag! You should not have to pay extra to get your data back and should not have to wait more than an hour to get it all downloaded either. Microsoft does not throttle Azure Backup downloads and I can almost guarantee that they have faster speeds than you have, meaning that you will be able to download at your maximum internet speeds and recover your systems quickly!

Support Rating

I am pretty confident that everyone knows that contacting Microsoft can be a hit or a miss. If you land a knowledgeable tech that can speak clear English, you are in luck! Now, do not let them put you on hold or transfer you...or you might get forgotten or the wrong department and have to start all over. Microsoft does offer good support and on the business level you can get good assistance...but many times must patiently get through the first many steps with the tech as they are required to follow scripts...including the steps taken to troubleshoot, regardless if you are already on step 6, they will start at step 1. Anyways, there is a tremendous number of online resources to support Azure and their products including Backups. My first step in getting assistance is to check the TechNet forums and Spiceworks forums before reaching out to Microsoft. Most times, a search on DuckDuckGo for the exact error you are troubleshooting or subject of a topic you are trying to understand, will land you an article someone wrote specifically about what you are trying to do. So there is are resources available but possibly not directly from Microsoft.

Key Insights

Do you think Azure Backup delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Azure Backup's feature set?

Yes

Did Azure Backup live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Azure Backup go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Backup again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Ubuntu OpenStack, FileZilla, Spiceworks

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure is secure, one of the most secure cloud-based user management software that easily and thoroughly connects to Microsoft Active Directory. Microsoft does a tremendous job at redundancy across their data centers and data itself inside each data center. This gives you the knowledge that regardless of what happens to one building, all your data is safe in Azure. Azure backups are very fast and work well with QOS in your network to allocate resources to other important tasks rather than a backup. Not everyone is a GUI user, many of us techs prefer to use Powershell commands to manage, setup, troubleshoot systems and data. As Microsoft owns all of this, Powershell is a quick way to get access to your data in the cloud and issue any needed commands to your system(s) in bulk or one at a time.

If you have a complete Linux or Mac environment, you may want to consider another solution as much of what Azure Backup offers is best used with Windows.

Back That Thing Up - With Azure Backup

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Backup