How to improve organization Resilience and Disaster Recovery with Azure?

   

      

     High Availability of infrastructure design between on-premise and cloud can keep the IT operations up and running. But the people have been displaced from their usual workplace or lost to their usual devices or systems.  Disrupted partner relationships and supply chain can delay the time to market and weaken the competitive advantage. An inadequate response can harm the company's image and the confidence of the customers and investors. If the people can't do their job, the business can not function. A successful business continuity program requires executives to play an active role in developing the plan and ensure the buy-in from company leadership. The top consideration for a business continuity plan is the development of a clear decision-making hierarchy. The key members of the business continuity team involve in planning and testing throughout the year and ensure the plan is effective and up to date under the pressure of an actual emergency.  The data protection costs you money, instead of it saving it as,

      1. More Time is equal to More Expensive: The complexity of containerized environments makes the time-consuming task of manipulating raw data and that costs you very high. The extensive recovery time results in a loss of revenue.

     2. Manual Process Takes More Resources: The more developers or staff take on manual tasks and protecting the entire environment and applications can be difficult.

   3. Customer Loss: You may lose the opportunity to bring a new customer or risk the current customer during the outages.

   4. Ransomware Protection: The separate solution for ransomware protection stuck you paying on top of the one you already have.

    The SaaS-based disaster recovery can automate the replication that asynchronously replicates workloads in the on-premise environment by One-Click Orchestrated recovery solutions and seamless integration with Azure services. Disaster recovery is a set of procedures that allow a company to recover IT infrastructure, corporate resources, and employee devices in the event of an unplanned disruption.  The disasters can be a natural events or man-made accidents. As a component of business continuity, DR ensures that critical technology remains available or is restored quickly. The strategy focuses on the restoration of hardware, applications, and data to minimize the impact of a negative event. The solutions are used to bring important systems back online, replicate critical data, and replace lost or inaccessible devices. The disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions ensures the company can continue to operate in the event of an emergency or failure. Disaster recovery plans include several essential elements like,

  * Inventory of Assets: It is a prioritized list of company equipment and services on day-to-day operations, physical hardware, and digital assets so that the important services and systems can be recovered fast. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of downtime a business can ensure before file recovery needs to take place. 

*  Roles: By assigning the roles, companies can prevent confusion for carrying out the various portions of the plan in the event of an emergency. It is the development of a clear decision-making hierarchy that has a set of responsibilities to carry out the disaster occurs with backup personnel the needs are covered.

* Contingency Plans: It depends on the disaster that will impact the business systems and data protection. So, we should include the different procedures for various events that could occur like the power outage, electrical fires, severe weather etc.,

* Formal Review Process: The disaster recovery planning to be effective, it should be handled on an ongoing basis that includes regular testing. Failing to regularly test the plan can put the company at risk of having outdated policies and procedures that are not relevant to current operations or that don't require during the disaster. For ex, the software updates would be the reason to update the plan as new vendor.

Replicate Failover in Azure:  Performing the failover is part of our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery(BCDR) strategy. BCDR strategy replicates our on-premise to Azure on an ongoing basis. The users can access the workloads and apps on the on-premises source machines. If there is an outage that occurs on-premises and you fail the replicating machines over to Azure. Azure VMs are created with the replicated data. The users can continue accessing apps on Azure VMs for business continuity. Failover can be performed by,

  1. Failover that creates and brings Azure VMs to the selected recovery point 

  2. After Failover verifies the VM in Azure and commits the failover to the selected recovery point or commit a different point.

 Failover in Azure Site Recovery has the following stages

Stage 1: Failover from on-premises after setting up replication to Azure for on-premises machines. When your on-premises site goes down, you fail those machines over to Azure.

Stage 2: Reprotecting Azure VM for replicating back to the on-premises site. The on-premise VM is set off at reproduction and ensures data consistency.

Stage 3: When the on-premise site is running as normal that specifies the failover from Azure has been done successfully and you can run another failover. The failback is an Azure VMs to our on-premise site. Now, you can fail back to the original location or to an alternate location.

Step 4: Finally, reprotecting on-premises machines after failing back and enables the replication of on-premises machines to Azure.

Recover WorkLoads: The organizations have been operating on infrastructure running in-house, there is an opportunity to migrate these workloads to Azure which saves the costs and provides space for these servers. Azure Site Recovery offers different options depending on the type of workload migration (physical or virtual). Azure Site Recovery provides a way to bring your servers into Azure while allowing them to be failed back to your on-premises data center as part of business continuity and disaster recovery. The common practice is to make the failover and use ASR to move servers to Azure. These steps are followed to configure Azure resources for migrating existing servers to Azure and configure components of Site Recovery.

Containers: Azure provides cloud-based workloads including:

       * Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

       * Azure container Instances (ACI)

       * Azure App Service

       * Azure Container Registry (ACR)

     Kubernetes service uses VM scale sets to protect your workloads from node failures. It is also important to segregate the process of recovering applications and data. The Azure storage solutions like disks and file shares create persistent volumes for applications hosted in containers and protect the data using Azure Backup. ACR's geolocation feature allows you to container images from the secondary regions when the primary endpoint goes down due to a regional outage.

    ACI is a  managed service that allows you to run containers on the Microsoft Azure public cloud without requiring the use of VMs. ACI provides basic capabilities for managing containers on a host machine. ACI layered approach, performing the management functions needed to run a single container. The orchestrators can manage activities related to multiple containers. Because the container instance's infrastructure is managed by Azure, the orchestrator doesn't find the right host to run a single container. The elasticity of the cloud ensures hosts are always available. For applications that experience fluctuations, you need to scale up the virtual machines in the cluster and deploy containers on those machines. ACI makes things simpler, by letting the orchestrator deploy new containers directly on ACI and terminate them when no longer needed.

       The Azure App Service provides multi-region deployment as the best way to minimize application downtime. It also provides a backup and restores feature that automatically creates a backup of your application configuration, file content, and databases connected to the app. If there is a regional outage, applications hosted in the Azure App service will be placed in DR mode. 

      For serverless apps like Azure functions and microservices-based deployment, it is best to separate the configuration from the code in cloud-scale deployments. The Azure App configuration can store configuration information that can be accessed during runtime. It also fast-tracks the redeployment process of applications during a disaster.

Deploy the Resources in Azure: Azure provides a way to deploy and manage VM and other resources. Azure resource manager is a deployment and management for Azure to manage resources using declarative JSON templates rather than scripts. With Azure resource manager, you can customize resource deployment using parameters, access controls, and more templates for any scenario you need to. To learn about resource group deployments, see Bicep or ARM template

 An enterprise-grade solution can speed up your recovery time. These are the things to look for

    * Click-Driven DR plans: Setting up the disaster recovery policies or custom policies for each individual application using built-in, click-driven workflows.

   * Continuous Backup: It is essential to look for a solution to limit the data loss that works around the clock

   * Multi-Tenant, Agentless and Self-Service: This solution saves time, money, and resources to restore your entire environment autonomously and efficiently.

  * Storage and Cloud Agnostic: Back up the point-in-time to any storage or cloud so that you are not dependent on the production environment copy.

Website recovery from Azure:   Azure site recovery service contributes to business continuity and disaster recovery strategy by keeping the business application online during the outages. Azure site recovery manages on-premise machines and virtual machines (VM) including replication, failover, and recovery. It is a cloud-based DaaS in the event of planned and unplanned outages. It helps to ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads during outages. It replicates workloads running on physical and VMs from a primary site to a secondary location. Azure Site Recovery can be used in cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. The data replication process makes sure copies are in sync and ASR ensures that the data is in usable data after the failover. ASR support for multiple scenarios like

    * Replication of Physical servers from on-premises to Azure

    * Windows and Linux VMs hosted in VMware and Hyper-V to Azure

    * Windows VMs hosted in AWS to Azure

    * Windows and Linux VMs in Azure to Azure

The replicated data is stored in Azure Storage which is resilient. ASR supports the protection of Windows and Linux Workloads hosted on physical servers on-premises, VMs hosted in VMware/Hyper-V, and third-party hosting platforms/cloud. The Azure ASR console provides a unified view of the replication status of different workloads and allows to carry out maintenance tasks such as tweaking plans. ASR supports replication frequencies as low as 30 sec and can be tailored to meet organization RPO and RTO targets. By integrating automation runbooks and the Traffic manager, the RTO can further be reduced. This tutorial will be useful for integrating or creating the cloud enabled SaaS applications with Azure Active Directory.