Azure Government provides a range of features and services you can use to build
cloud solutions that meet your regulated compute and data needs.
Azure Government protects your critical data and applications
with enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery solutions in the cloud
—reducing cost and complexity,
while ensuring maximum availability of your data and applications.
Azure Government ensures workloads and data are
fully backed up and protected from disasters,
while providing encryption of stored data for agency and citizen security.
To begin this process, let’s start by selecting the
storage account we want to review data encryption.
From there, we go to encryption settings.
Storage encryption is automatically enabled at a
storage account level and supports encryption of Blob,
File,
Table,
and Queue storage.
This ensures all data is protected on upload.
Encryption of data helps with sensitive information storage,
but what if data is accidentally deleted or corruption occurs?
Azure Government provides an integrated backup-as-a-service,
available to all workloads, storage, and application data.
It replaces the need for legacy tape,
optical drives, and on-premises systems.
You can use the safe and secure storage mechanisms of Azure Government,
partnered with a leading backup management solution.
Now let’s see how simple this really is to deploy.
We can do this in minutes
- as opposed to the hours or even days it used to take.
First, we need to create a Recovery Vault.
Think of this as a container where we manage backup
and disaster recovery within an Azure Government region.
Next we’ll provide a relevant name for your Recovery Vault.
We will make sure to keep US Virginia selected as the region.
This is where the VMs we want to back up reside.
Now simply click Create to complete the Vault Creation wizard.
Now we want to start the initial process of configuring backup.
To do this, we select the region we just created.
Then we launch the built-in Backup wizard.
This is the easiest way to get started.
And, like before, you can back up from any source,
including on-premises and Azure Government.
In this case, our VMs reside in the US Virginia region,
so we’ll go ahead and select Azure.
Our next option is to choose the backup policy we want to use.
By default, Azure incrementally backs up all sources every 24 hours.
Usually at 2:00am local time and keeps back ups for 30 days.
To retain backups longer, for specific compliance needs,
simply create new backup policies or back up more frequently.
In our case scenario, we’re going to choose
the default policy because it fits our needs.
In this case, we’re going to select all our
current VMs residing in the US Virginia region.
And, really, that’s it.
We’ve successfully enabled backup on the selected VMs.
Restoration is equally easy.
Just choose to restore the entire list of VMs back to the source location
- or any location you want.
You can even mount the backup if you want to restore a single file.
While backup is critical for data protection,
it’s not a disaster recovery solution.
DR solutions are created to enable the restoration of
an entire data center of workloads and applications,
with very little to no data loss, as rapidly as possible.
Let's see how easy it is to implement this.
The VMs we want to ensure DR protection on are in the US Virginia region.
To meet compliance needs,
we have created our disaster recovery management site in the US Texas region.
This could be any Azure Government region that the source workloads don’t reside in.
We can again use the intuitive Site Recovery wizard
to rapidly deploy this solution.
First, we need to connect to the source site.
In this case US Virginia.
Once that’s selected,
we can then choose the workloads we want to put under ASR protection.
We can use any Azure region, other than the source, to replicate our workloads.
In this case, let’s choose US Arizona.
Now we simply enable the replication.
By default, ASR uses synchronous replication for Azure to Azure,
which ensures the replicated workload is kept up-to-date
and in real-time with the source.
Replication is only half of any successful DR implementation.
We now need to create a recovery plan.
Let’s add a new recovery plan for the five VMs we just replicated.
We follow a similar process as we did for the replication,
where we select the source site.
Then we select the VMs we want to include as part of this plan.
And that’s it.
We now have a base recovery plan ready,
allowing us to configure the start up sequence
and any associated tasks we may want to execute.
We have now accomplished a fully completed discovery plan,
where we have created a serial process for server start-up,
including further tasks that may need to occur.
With the built-in capability for data protection across encryption,
backup and DR,
Azure Government provides a secure and compliant
solution for any mission-critical workloads.
Learn more on azure.com/gov