We're reviewing our Azure backup strategy and want to understand how other production teams protect Azure VMs, Blob Storage, Azure SQL databases, and a few terabytes of data. Native Azure Backup covers many needs, but we're also considering copies outside the production environment, such as a separate tenant, another cloud, or a dedicated backup platform. What approach has worked best for you? Have you stayed with native services, added isolated copies, adopted a third-party solution, or used a different design? We'd also appreciate lessons from restores or disaster recovery testing that influenced your backup architecture.
2 Answers
We began with the native backup services, but eventually added a separate backup platform so recovery wouldn't depend entirely on the production tenant. The extra isolation gives us another option if the tenant or its backup controls are compromised.
We moved to NAKIVO for our Azure VM backups because it lets us send backup copies to a different cloud. In our experience, restores are also noticeably faster than using the native tools alone. For the rest of the environment, we'd still make sure Blob Storage and Azure SQL have their own tested protection and retention policies rather than assuming VM backups cover them.
That matches our concern. The native tools handle the basics well, but we want an additional layer of isolation for larger incidents.