Data Protection for Your Azure Cloud-Native & Hybrid Cloud Workloads

Do you remember the days of client/server and Windows NT? Maybe I’m dating myself. How about when we started to see Windows Server, Active Directory, or maybe Hyper-V? Do you remember how painful it was to back up your legacy Microsoft back then? Today, most people are talking about cloud and rightfully so as Microsoft Azure and Office 365 are among the fastest growing franchises at Microsoft. But as the saying goes, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

That’s right. I’m looking at you Mr. “Backup & Recovery”. First, things haven’t gotten any better with your legacy on-premises backup for Microsoft environments – you may have added deduplication hardware and the latest support for Windows Server 2019, but you’re mostly looking at solutions that were designed and architected 20 years ago. Second, as mentioned above we now have cloud. Since it’s a managed service, you don’t need to worry about backups anymore, right? WRONG.

Cloud providers – including Microsoft, which offers Azure and Office 365 – employ a shared responsibility model. In short, what this means is they’ll take care of physical cloud infrastructure, like their data centers and servers. But when it comes to your data, it’s almost solely your responsibility to secure, manage, and back up your data. If someone with fat fingers hits the “delete” button, or if a bad actor deploys the latest ransomware scheme to get ahold of your Office 365 account, you may be out of luck if you didn’t properly back up your cloud data.

So what should you do? You can deploy cloud-specific backup products or services that are offered as stand-alone point solutions. But, the problem with that is you are basically introducing  yet another tool, another user interface, and another data silo that needs to be managed and taken care of. Too much complexity. In a recent Vansen and Bourne survey, 9 in 10 participants stated the cloud has NOT delivered on its expected benefits and 91% believe mass data fragmentation is the cause.

Single platform for hybrid cloud data management

Cohesity provides a single data management platform and UI for hybrid cloud environments. Our platform seamlessly integrates and provides data mobility between on-premises and the cloud. It does away with legacy infrastructure, software, and separate point solution by unifying, protecting, and managing all your data from new cloud workloads running on Azure to your legacy on-premises Windows environments.

New integrations with Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud solutions

I’m excited as we are now offering several new integrations and capabilities that simplify data management on Azure and hybrid cloud.

1. Efficient backup of Azure cloud-native workloads

   1. Cohesity cloud-native backup
      Running Cohesity software directly on Azure, customers can more efficiently back up their Azure VMs and workloads using snapshot based APIs to speed backup and recovery while minimizing the impact on production VMs. Data is stored and managed by Cohesity making it fully searchable and easily recoverable anywhere – whether that’s in another cloud region or back on-premises. It further reduces cloud storage and data transfer costs using global data deduplication and compression.
   2. Cohesity cloud snapshot manager
      This software feature can run from a Cohesity deployment on-premises or in the cloud. Many customers may choose to run this on-premises as it doesn’t require spinning up additional cloud resources. Instead it provides a lightweight solution to protect your Azure cloud workloads remotely from on-premises environments. Cloud snapshot manager uses Azure APIs to manage snapshot data and metadata remotely. Backup/snapshot data is stored in Azure BLOBs cloud storage and metadata is stored and indexed in Cohesity for easy search and recovery.

1. Backup of two Azure hybrid cloud solutions

   1. Microsoft Azure Stack backup
      Cohesity now supports comprehensive policy-based backup and recovery of Azure Stack VMs data and infrastructure. This is important since Azure Stack is a hardware/software/services solution – you need to protect both the VMs and data running inside Azure Stack as well as the supporting infrastructure. Leveraging our core platform capabilities you will be able to do global searches and granular recoveries for files and VMs and deliver fast backup and recovery performance with the ability to do instant mass restores of thousands of VMs at a time.
   2. Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple backup
      If much of your on-premises infrastructure is on VMware and your cloud strategy leans on Azure this may be the solution for you. Cohesity integrates seamlessly with both Azure and VMware and can now backup VMware workloads running on Azure bare metal instances managed by CloudSimple. It provides a single platform to consolidate, protect, and manage all your VMware VMs and data running anywhere on-premises and cloud. You get our full platform benefits such as global search and cost savings through global deduplication while maintaining a consistent experience over hybrid cloud using the same VMware tools you are familiar with today.

Now may be a good time to change and start rethinking your backup and data management strategy as hybrid cloud is becoming more a reality with each passing day. Many of our customers have already made the change and are reaping the benefits.

Here are few other blogs you maybe interested in:

SaaS Apps Require Backup – Myth or Reality?
4 Reasons to Backup Microsoft Exchange Online
Why O365 Exchange Online needs a backup
Should you Backup Your On-Premises Exchange – Yes or No?
Why Enterprises Need Great Backups: Office 365 Exchange Online Edition