Most small and medium-sized businesses have continuously adopted the use of clouds to store their data. Therefore, a good backup solution enables them to recover their crucial data while at the same time ensuring security and privacy.
Azure Backup is a Microsoft cloud-based solution that helps back up essential files, physical machines, folders, virtual machines, and applications stored on premises. It is a straightforward backup solution that doesn’t require the installation of complex tools. The data recovery process is also simple and faster. However, to ensure the effectiveness of azure backups, there are practices every organization must observe.
The following article will look at the DOs and the DON’Ts when doing an Azure backup.
The DOs When Doing Azure Backups
1. Have A Third-Party Backup
Most Organizations rely on Azure backups only for Business continuity and disaster recovery plans. However, you should ensure that these services satisfy all your backups and recovery needs considering the cost and redundancy.
As an Azure user, there are several costs you will have to incur as charged by Microsoft. For example, a flat backup charge occurs due to the size of the protected data, and the storage use will also be charged.
A reliable third-party Azure DevOps backups can help eliminate some of these cost concerns. A third-party solution enables you to have better control over backups and recovery. Further, it also helps to provide an extra layer of protection in case of any outage and offers a full recovery of data.
2. Ensure Soft Delete Is Enabled
Enabling soft delete will help protect your backups from malicious or accidental deletes for at least two weeks at no additional cost. The soft delete is always enabled by default for newly created recovery services. This feature allows you to recover your backup items before they are permanently lost. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that it is enabled since it is hard to recover deleted backup items.
Further, you can use a multi-user authorization as an extra layer of protection which helps in preventing any rogue admin incidents. It uses a Resource Guard, which ensures that critical operations are only performed through applicable authorization. Examples of these vital operations include; disabling soft delete, decreasing retention of backup policies, and stopping and deleting backups.
3. Encrypt All Your Backup Data
Though all the backup data not in use are encrypted by default using platform-managed keys (PMK), you can increase the privacy of your data by integrating other encryption features. For example, you can adopt customer-managed keys (CMK), which enable you to own and manage the encryption keys.
Further, you can customize the encryption on the storage infrastructure using an infrastructure level. This enables you to provide double privacy of your backup items that are not in use. In addition, you can back up encrypted Azure VMs and encrypted SQL, which ensure end-to-end encryption.
4. Regulate The Accessibility To The Backup Resources
Through Azure role-based access control, you can manage who access the backup resources. With Azure Backup, you can grant your team members a specific amount of access, which they need to execute all their azure management duties. You can take advantage of the privileged identity management to give a time-based and approval-based role activation, which helps to prevent the risk of excessive, misused, and unnecessary permissions.
5. Ensure You Set Up Alerts For Critical Backup Operations
Azure Backup has a variety of monitoring and notification features for various incidents. Therefore, you should ensure they are well-configured for timely notifications and the necessary actions. It would help if you took advantage of the Azure Monitor for alerts to receive all the notifications for critical operations.
The DON’TS When Doing Azure Backups
To ensure that your backup data in Azure is secured, apart from doing some practices perfectly, there are things you should avoid doing. Some of the DON’Ts when doing Azure backups help to protect your data from security malware or malicious actors from performing risky operations on the backup storage.
- Avoid backing up data that can’t be hosted in Azure. Azure backup data such as; files, folders, system states, file shares, machine configurations, and app-specific data. You should integrate the Data Protection Manager or Microsoft Azure Recovery Service (MARS) backup server to backup other data.
- Do not store the cache folder in locations such as offline volume, a removable disk, or network share.
- Avoid renaming your backup servers, as this will require re-registering them to the vault. The re-registering process can be lengthy; if it fails, all the backups will be stopped.
- You should not use more than 20 disks on the same backup schedule in one storage account. This will help reduce the backup process’s impact on your disk performance.
Wrapping Up
Almost all businesses and organizations require backup services for essential data. Azure Backup is Microsoft’s cloud-based service that can play a significant role in the Backup and recovery of data for small, medium, or large businesses. You can adopt the Azure backup solution as it is pure cloud and is reliable and secure. Further, it is an effective solution in terms of cost and functionality.
