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>> Hello, everyone. I'm Utsav Raghuvanshi,
I'm a program manager with Azure Backup,
and today we're going to talk about what's new with Azure Backup.
I'm pretty sure everyone watching
this session is already familiar with what Azure Backup is,
but just a quick recap.
Azure Backup is a fully managed service
that is built entirely in Azure and
that lets you backup your workloads
in the Cloud as well as on-premises.
Now, what really differentiates Azure Backup is that it does
not require you to set up
any infrastructure like servers or storage.
This makes it really simple to use
and it also lowers your cost of ownership.
Now, all of Azure Backup's philosophy revolves around
three core pillars of providing
diverse mission critical workload support,
secure and resilient data protection,
and simple and cost effective management.
Now, let me give you a quick sneak peek into how we do this.
Backup integrates natively into
various workloads of yours that run in Azure,
like Azure Virtual Machines,
databases like SQL Server,
and SAP HANA running inside these virtual machines,
as well as Azure Files.
This is why you do not need to write any scripts or
provision any infrastructure to get started.
Backup also uses
the highly reliable and available Azure Blob Storage
to store your backups.
Apart from various capabilities already provided by Blob Storage,
Backup also provides its own set of features in the form
of ready security measures like role-based access control,
encryption options, self delete.
You have various access tiers and you
have various redundancy options for your backups,
like LRS, GRS and RA-GRS.
Honestly, you don't need to worry about
cleaning up your older recovery points.
Backup does it for you.
Backup also seamlessly scales with
your growing data assets and backup assets.
Also you have various automation options at your disposal,
like Powershell, CLI, you have ARM Templates and rest APIs.
Backup also leverages
various core Azure infrastructure management technologies
like Azure Policy,
Resource Graph Monitor, and Lighthouse.
So you don't have to adopt
a new strategy for thinking about your backup management.
Backup also provides with these tools like Backup Explorer and
Reports that help you analyze your backup usage.
With this versatile architecture,
Backup provides you a simple,
secure and cost effective solution to meet all your backup needs.
Now, let's have a look at what's new with Azure Backup.
First and foremost, we add a new workload to the list.
Today, we're excited to announce
the public preview for PostgresSQL Server backup.
With this, you can perform
long term retention of your backups till up to 10 years.
Also, this allows to manage your operations at the database level.
You have much more granular control over what you want to
backup and for how long you want to retain it.
Also, you get to restore your databases across
different versions which might well be the case if you're
choosing to perform a restore several years down the line.
Also all your backups are retained in a different fault domain.
Which means if in a case of something happening to your servers,
your Azure server that is,
your backups still remained intact.
Do check out the link at the bottom of
the page for more details on this.
We're very happy to inform you about
another workload that we're adding
to the list in the coming month.
This is the Azure Blob Storage
and we have an operation backup solution
for it coming out in October.
The operation backup for Azure Blob Storage allows you to
retain backups of your Azure Blobs
in the source storage account itself.
This gives you protection against
various data loss scenarios like deletion and overwrites of blobs,
accidental deletions of storage accounts,
as well as tampering with
the data protection settings of the storage account.
You also get various management options that allow you to manage
Azure Blobs and the protection at
scale across different storage accounts.
Once again, I would urge you to check out the link at
the bottom of the page to know
more about what the solution has to offer.
New workloads is not all that's new.
We have some great enhancements
for our existing workloads as well.
Starting with Azure VM's,
you now have selective disc backups that allow you to
get much more granular control over what you want to backup.
We have extended the support to various new configurations
of virtual machines as well such as Virtual Machine Scale Sets,
as well as Virtual Machines having larger discs,
as well as Virtual Machines having large number
of discs that is up to 32 discs.
Backup also provides a new app consistency framework for
Virtual Machines that run big databases
like Oracle and MySQL in the next VMs.
You can use an app consistency snapshot for backing these up now.
We have some restore enhancements as well.
For example, you can now restore
your unmanaged discs as managed discs.
Coming to databases, today,
we're excited to announce the public preview for
cross region restore of SQL and SAP HANA databases.
This ensures that your backups are
available and recoverable at all times.
SAP HANA databases running on
RHEL machines are also now supported.
Also, something to look out for in the next month
is the private preview for Incremental Backups.
SQL Server also has some notable improvements,
such as SQL Server backup now
supports backup of databases over two TBs.
You also have improved speed of backup for
all databases of all sizes for SQL.
Azure Files also has its share
of enhancements such as integration into
the Azure Files UI and
all protected file shares now have
protection against accidental deletions.
Azure Files Backup also has
a new backup policy that uses
a Grandfather-Father-Son scheme for specifying retention,
as well as a new flat and cost effective pricing model.
Moving from workloads onto security,
this incredibly important pillar
when it comes to backup also has some notable improvements.
Starting off with resiliency,
we're excited to announce
the public preview for Zone-redundant backup storage.
This allows you to get improved availability
of your data without even having to move out of the region.
We also have some security updates like in addition to
support of private endpoints for backup and
encryption of backup data using customer managed keys,
we are also now excited to announce
the limited public preview for multi-user authentication.
Now let's take a look at how Backup can help
you manage your ever growing and vast data sources.
Azure data assets and backup assets continue to grow.
You'll see that they spread across different worlds,
different subscriptions, different regions,
and at times even different tenants.
At times like these, you have questions like,
how do I ensure that all my data sources
that deserved to be backed up are being
backed up and they're being backed up correctly?
How do I know if everything is going on as
it should be going on and if
there's something that needs my attention?
Also, how do you know how your usage is fairing?
Is there a way to optimize your usage?
Therefore, your importance of
governance, monitoring, and operating,
and gathering insight, it increases
exponentially as your backup assets continue to grow.
Today, we're excited to
announce the public preview for Backup Center.
Now, Backup Center is your single pane of glass that
can help you achieve all of this and a lot more.
In order to get started with Backup Center,
all you need to do is just type Backup Center into
the Azure portal search bar
and you'll see the Backup Center icon pop up.
Just click on it and here you are.
Now, I know I've talked about it already how Backup Center is
that single pane of glass that you
need and this is what I mean when I say that.
Right now, I can manage all the data sources and
all the backup instances across
my 450 volts data spread across 37 subscriptions.
Not only that, also across 63 locations.
If I'm using my lighthouse account,
I can actually get my backup details
across different subscriptions as well.
Now, right now I have
chosen Azure Virtual Machines as my data source type,
but you can go ahead and choose
whichever data source type you want more details for.
One of the first things you'll notice when you
land on Backup Center is the job start.
Now, this gives you a quick snapshot of
all the jobs that have run over the last 24 hours.
You can further click
"View All" and get more details on them as well.
Another thing you'll notice almost
instantly is the backup instances code.
This is a quick summary of
all your backup instances of your chosen data source type.
You can further drill down by simply clicking on
it and you'll see all your protected instances.
You can take various actions by simply clicking on the ellipses.
Now, one thing you'll notice in all of these views is you have
a lot of filtered options available on the top.
In fact, you have a new filter for tags also.
An important thing to note over here is that all of these filters,
they work on the data source itself.
You don't need to worry about
what mode or data source is being backed up and
your data source is
your actual resource or your workload data you're protecting.
Backup Center is not just great for monitoring,
but it's your actual one-stop for all your actions as well.
For example, you can easily use it to start configuring backup,
initiate restores, add policies and vaults as well.
Let me quickly show you how to
configure backup and how easy it is to configure backup.
You start by choosing a data source and choosing
the PostgresSQL server because that's
the latest edition to the family of supported workloads.
Next time ask to choose a vault.
Let me quickly search for my vault using the search bar.
There it is. Simply select it.
Now, the next thing I am asked to choose is the backup policy,
which governs how frequently my backups will
occur and how long my backup data will be retained for.
Let me go ahead and choose my production policy,
which gives me five years of retention.
Then I'm asked to choose what I'm supposed to protect.
I can choose multiple databases across media servers.
Let me go ahead and choose the database that I want to protect.
Now, we do a quick round of validations.
At this point, we try to validate if the vault that you have
chosen has the right set of permissions
to access the databases or not.
It's important to note here,
we do not store any credentials anywhere.
In fact, we use a highly secure AD supported method for doing so.
Once done, just click "Next" and you can
configure backup just like that. Simple, right?
An equally simple if not simpler is to
initiate restores and add policies and vaults.
Now, an important part of being able to
manage that scale is to being able to govern that scale.
Backup Center makes it tremendously
easy for you to do that as well.
You can use Azure policies and apply them at
your chosen scope to perform various actions like audit or deploy.
I have various policies over here and once I apply these policies,
I can use a backup compliancy
to see how well I'm adhering to these.
An important resource over
here is the Protectable Datasources tab.
Now, this view gives me a list of
all those data sources that
are not configured for being backed up.
Let me go and check if all my production servers
are being backed up or not.
I use a production tab on all of my servers,
which I'll go and check.
There are some, five servers that ought to be
protected but are not being backed up right now.
They're not configured for backup right now and I
can get more details out of them right from here.
In fact, if I'm using virtual machines
and if I'm viewing these details for virtual machines,
I can go ahead and configure backups right from here.
I noticed some of my machines over here they're
SQL machines and Oracle machines.
Now, with the new app consistency framework,
I can actually use backup to
perform app-consistent backups as well for these machines.
Another great thing that Backup Center
helps you do is to be able to
track your usage of backups and analyze your backup patterns.
This is where backup reports come in extremely handy.
Backup reports can give you key insights
and analysis at various levels of granularity.
Let me quickly choose a workspace for myself.
This is the workspace that I have and then I can get started.
One new thing you'll notice in
Backup reports is the Optimized tab.
The Optimize tab gives you opportunity to
optimize your backup usage in several ways.
One of the ways is to find out what are your inactive resources.
An inactive resource is
one of those resources that hasn't been configured for backup,
but has not registered a successful backup
over a specified period of time,
which is seven days in this case.
Similarly, you can optimize your policy usage as well.
You get options to optimize
your retention as well as well as your schedule.
Let me quickly show you what backup schedule optimization means.
Right now I see I have several databases that
are configured for daily full backups.
Maybe I don't need daily full backups and maybe I'm
better off with weekly full backups
and daily differential backups,
and that might translate into some cost savings for me.
Backup Center in similar ways gives you insights and analyzes
your usage and suggest things to do
that can result in
your optimizations and in turn, cost savings as well.
In short, we see that Backup Center that single pane
of glass that lets you monitor,
operate, govern as well as gather insights on your backup usage.
That was a quick tour of Backup Center for you.
To check out Backup Center yourself at aka.ms/azurebackupcenter.
Here is a quick summary of everything that we discussed.
You would have noticed Azure Backup
continues to strengthen all its pillars.
In addition to various product updates
and announcements that we talked about,
we also encourage you to try
out the new advanced pricing calculator.
In case if you're interested in signing up for any previews,
feel free to write to us at AskAzureBackupTeam@Microsoft.com.
Here's some great resources that you might want to look at.
We also have a related session coming up called
Minimize Business Disruption with
backup and disaster recovery on Azure.
Here we talk about some great security and resiliency content from
both backup and site recovery that can
help you meter BCDR objectives.
Also, feel free to let us know
about any features that you would like us to consider.
For these or anything else,
you can always write to us at AskAzureBackupTeam@Microsoft.com.
This is it from my end for now.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Do let us know what you think about it.
Thank you, and have a good day.
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