Azure disaster recovery overview - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this course, we're going to explore Azure backup and Azure site recovery as part of Azure Disaster Recovery Solutions and we can use these solutions to protect our resources in Azure as well as our resources on premise, but before we get started, I'd like to kind of bring down the mood a little bit and go through a list of natural disasters including the very recent 2017 wildfires in California. And these were followed by devastating mudslides. In 2013 both Calgary and Toronto had major flooding. For those of you in the US, you probably remember the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. And in 1998, there was a major ice storm that affected both Canada and the Northeast US. And when we think about natural disasters, we typically think about wildfires and floods but let's not forget our animal friends. In 2017, a shark bit a Google underwater cable. Now it didn't cause an outage but it just goes to show you that a natural disaster can and will occur. Other risk factors for disasters include hardware failures. We've all experienced this. Cyber attacks. We're hearing more about cyber attacks in the news daily. Human errors. We've all had those moments. For example, Level 3 had an outage on November 16th in 2017 that brought down Comcast internet in the US and this was caused by a human error. And that's just one example. I want to assure you when you put your resources in Azure, that Microsoft takes security and protection very seriously and they have already provided a variety of protection solutions including multiple data centers. Your data is replicated between data centers in different regions to ensure that if one region goes down the other region is up and running. Microsoft also provides the Azure Traffic Manager. This solution automates the traffic flow to unaffected regions automatically. You don't have to worry about it and this is handled at the fabric layer. Again, you don't have to worry about it, Microsoft handles this. Microsoft also ensures that your Azure SQL databases have three copies of the backup in the same region. Availability sets for virtual machines is not specifically handled by Microsoft but it is something that you can leverage in order to protect your virtual machines. Now you do have to configure these. Azure Cosmos DB has automatic backups that are replicated to another region. And MySQL and PostgreSQL both have automatic backups as well. No matter whether or not your resources are in Azure, if they're on premise, or combination of the two, you need a disaster recovery plan. And this plan should include planning, what to do when a disaster strikes. You need to test your plan. How many times have each of us gone to retrieve a backup only to realize the backup has failed? Be sure to test. Your disaster recovery plan should include your resources in the same location as well as a different location and those different locations could be a hot, warm, or cold site. And no discussion about business continuity and disaster recovery would be complete without touching on RTO and RPO. RTO or recovery time objective is the duration or length of time that a business must be functional after a disaster. And each company will have a different requirement for the RTO. Next we have the recovery point objective or RPO and this is the maximum amount of data that can be lost after a disaster. Again, this will be different for each company. Let's go ahead and take a look at an example of RTO and RPO. In this example the RPO is six hours. This is when the last backup occurred. And in this example, the company is willing to lose up to six hours worth of data. The RTO is 12 hours. The company is willing to be without their data for up to 12 hours, but at that 12 hour mark, the data must be restored and functional. And keep in mind, to keep your RPO and RTO to a minimum, the cost will typically increase. Using the different Azure recovery solutions that are available to you, you can ensure that your data is protected and recoverable whether that data is on premise or in Azure.