Azure Backup Reviews

I use Azure Backup primarily for backing up virtual machines, storage accounts, and SQL databases.

The most valuable features of Azure Backup for us are its flexible retention options and the ability to recover to a second region with geo-replication and read access. These features enable us to create off-site backups, ensuring data recovery in case of a region outage, thus enhancing our disaster recovery capabilities.

Azure Backup could improve by offering better integration for Oracle databases and enhancing features like granular restore and backup compliance capabilities. These additions would further enhance its versatility and usability for a wider range of scenarios.

I have been working with Azure Backup for a few years.

I would rate the stability of Azure Backup as a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of the solution as a seven out of ten. We are gradually implementing Azure Backup in our new environment, and once fully deployed, we expect to use it for around 50 to 60 servers.

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as an eight out of ten. Setting up Azure Backup was pretty straightforward, especially if you follow the steps in the right order. It might seem a bit complex at first, but with experience, subsequent setups become easier. Planning is key to optimizing its effectiveness.

Deploying Azure Backup typically takes around half an hour to an hour to set up one VM, involving creating a recovery services vault, defining a backup policy, and configuring storage options. For a more comprehensive setup including proper recovery planning, it might take a few hours. The key steps involve creating a resource group, and a recovery services vault, selecting a storage type, and defining backup policies. I deployed the solution myself.

I would rate the pricing of Azure Backup around six or seven out of ten in terms of affordability, considering the total cost. The pricing depends on factors like storage choices and retention needs, but overall, it is considered affordable and works well for both on-premises and Azure environments, particularly in Windows environments.

I can restore VMs easily with Azure Backup, although I don't need to do it regularly. However, I have tested it, and it works exactly as expected.

Azure Backup is our top choice for data protection, offering native backup for critical systems like SAP HANA and SQL. Its automation capabilities ensure seamless backups, significantly improving our organization's data management efficiency.

The most beneficial feature of Azure Backup for our data protection strategy has been centralization through Backup Center, allowing us to manage and monitor all backups in one place.

Azure Backup meets our compliance requirements by encrypting all backups at rest, ensuring data protection. Additionally, role-based access control allows us to manage who can access the backups.

Maintaining backups and restores with Azure Backup is straightforward, especially compared to more complex solutions like NetBackup and data domains.

Before implementing Azure Backup, it is crucial to understand your business requirements, including recovery objectives like RPO and RTO. This cloud-native solution is straightforward to set up and manage, but aligning it with your specific needs ensures optimal performance and effectiveness.

Overall, I would rate Azure Backup as a nine out of ten.

Like any backup product, we use Azure Backup to have a secure backup and restore it. Azure backup itself is provisioned on the Azure portal with the Azure products. We are a gold partner with Microsoft, and we use all Microsoft products in our enterprise.

Azure Backup is easy to configure and restore. You can use Azure Backup to backup on-premises servers as well.

The solution’s user interface could be improved and made better. Microsoft would declare a support issue as an application-level issue because there is no differentiation at the user level, and they won't restore.

I have been using Azure Backup for the last 5 years.

We had some issues in the past with the solution's stability.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

Our company has around 70,000 employees, and over 200 VMs are currently used for data backup.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

Microsoft's support needs to zero down the specialist because they have a different expert at every component level. When you try to reach them, they will just pass it on to a different team every time, which takes a long time. In case of a major incident, it's really scary to wait long to get the exact technical expert to work on it.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup is simple.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

Azure Backup is a moderately priced solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten.

I would recommend Azure Backup to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

My company uses Azure Backup for its multiple customers. My company uses the solution for both SAP and non-SAP workloads. The solution works fantastic since we have not faced any issues. My company uses the solution as a backup tool for files and folders. We also used the solution in our company as a VM-level backup and backup storage device.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from how Azure manages redundancy. We have a cross-region backup also enabled in my company, because of which, in case of disaster, we have a replica available in another data center. The aforementioned feature makes it a fantastic tool. Another great future of the product is encryption supported by the solution to get the backup for any virtual machine or disk encrypted in our company. Both the aforementioned features are its most wonderful and coolest features.

My company faces a lot of difficulties in restoring any encrypted VM backup. Some user-friendly automation solutions should be provided in the Azure portal to help us when we try to restore any encrypted virtual machine or disk to avoid complexities during the restoration process.

I have been using Azure Backup for four to five years. My company functions as a managed service provider to the end users of Azure Backup.

It is a stable solution.

It is a highly scalable solution.

My company deals with medium and enterprise-sized customers of Azure Backup.

The technical support part is handled by third-party vendors with a V-dash account. Depending on where our company gets support from, we do not occasionally get the correct response at the correct time. My company does get a proper response when connected directly to the support from Microsoft and not to any third-party vendor.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I don't directly use Veeam in my company. One of my company's customers uses Veeam as a backup for their virtual machines, so my company is in the process of helping that customer migrate from Veeam to Azure Backup.

The initial setup of Azure Backup is easy.

The solution can be deployed in ten to fifteen minutes.

The number of people required for the deployment depends upon the number of virtual machines that must be onboarded in the backup. Ideally, a person or two can easily manage the backup solution of an enterprise-level customer.

Considering the fact that our company's enterprise-sized customers use the solution, the product's price is fine and is not on the higher side of the spectrum.

Azure Backup can be maintained easily by one or two people.

I would tell those planning to use the solution that it is a user-friendly product. Azure Backup is a durable and scalable solution that has added an interesting feature to itself by supporting the backup functionalities for the SAP HANA Database.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

The principal use cases of the solution are attached to SQL databases and virtual machines.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed of the recovery tasks.

I have been using Azure Backup for six years. My company is a customer and has a partnership with Microsoft.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

With Azure Backup, I have not had to deal with any issues like bugs or breaking down.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I don't have any issues related to the product's scalability.

Around 90 people in my organization use the solution.

Previously, in our company, we used a different solution before going ahead with Azure Backup. The reason my company chose Azure Backup was because of the simplicity it offered.

I don't know if the product's setup phase is easy or difficult since I am not involved in the setup process. I am only responsible for the team that carries out the steps related to the product's setup phase in our organization.

Azure Backup is a product that is priced at a cheap rate, and it is a great tool. The product is worth the money you pay for it.

The solution's features are enough to meet our company's use cases.

Whether I recommend the solution to others or not is something that depends on the necessity of those who plan to use it. I recommend the solution to those who have a simple infrastructure.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

The product is used for disaster recovery. We worked for a bank that needed disaster recovery. The bank was using a VMware solution. They also had some critical virtual machines. So, we deployed the solution for them.

The tool has a lot of features. It is really useful.

We faced some issues synchronizing the information in Azure when the storage was changed. We have to troubleshoot a lot. We do not know the reason for the issue.

I use the solution in my organization.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. Only three to four companies use the solution in our region.

Our customers contact the support team to troubleshoot their issues.

I have used Nutanix. There was a big difference in the cost of Nutanix and Azure. Azure has a pay-as-you-go model. Azure is better than Nutanix.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is a cloud solution. We download the agent and scan for the VMs on-premise. Then, we connect the on-premise server with Azure. Later, we do the network and storage configuration.

We save money because we do not need a data center. We pay only for storage, and it is not very expensive.

The product is not expensive. We just pay for the storage. The storage is not expensive.

Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Azure Backup is best suited for people who have their workloads on Azure. 80% of the use case is for people using compute instances or compute capacity on Azure.

There is a smaller use case for people who want scalable storage, which some can scale up and down, even though their workloads may not be in Azure and maybe a data center workload instead. Azure backup is a good solution if one needs scalable workloads on a cost-effective platform. Those are two primary use cases.

Azure lets you classify your backups as per the user, such as if they are archival backups or if it is something you need to use on a more frequent basis. You can select the tiering for your backup and manage your cost. It's not one single monolithic cost. You can choose your backup storage requirement and choose your storage tiering. And then, of course, you can get a more cost-effective backup at the end of the day. As you move into more cloud-native solutions, which means cloud-native applications developed on and for the cloud, your allocation or backup configuration becomes much more seamless. Moreover, the integrity of your backups is retained without you needing to manually check them. And then configuring your backups integrating your backups is almost seamless for your cloud-native application.

It still does not have a lot of customization, especially if your workloads are not in Azure. More and more customers are looking at hybrid solutions when they have something on Azure, a data center, and a private cloud. Your backup solution may not be customizable enough to suit your requirements when you have a hybrid environment. If it's completely Azure, Azure Backup is an excellent solution. However, there are better alternatives when discussing a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud solution.

In addition, Though not in my personal opinion or experience, certain security and compliance questions have been raised around Azure, and that's where Azure needs to buckle down as well.

I've worked with the solution for five to six years.

The product is stable. We have not seen any concerns or issues with stability.

There are some medium-based clients, but the bulk of our clients are enterprise clients.

Azure's technical support is good, but there is always room for improvement. It's much better than its competitors.

Positive

Azure Backup is pretty simple to deploy if your applications are hosted on Azure. And the more cloud-native services you use, the easier it is to deploy. The closer you are to Azure's native environment, the easier it gets. It's almost seamless. It's just about checking a few boxes, and it's done. The complexities come in when you are in a hybrid environment.

The time taken to deploy the solution depends upon your backup policy. At most, deploying would not take more than a few minutes. Configuring the backup policies will take time, but actual deployment takes minutes.

Azure Backup is simpler to maintain compared to an on-prem backup. It's a managed service from Azure. With a backup solution, the important thing is to check your daily, weekly, and monthly schedule and the integrity of backups. That's the most time-consuming part, but all that gets highly automated in Azure.

Azure Backup can be expensive if you are not vigilant about your storage steering. You need to monitor your usage. After your backup, your data goes into your storage solution, and the storage can escalate. It should be actively monitored and managed. Otherwise, Azure Backup can get very pricey. But the solution can be very cost-effective if you are smart and have the right governance. Looking at the long term and your usage fluctuates over time, it becomes a much more cost-effective option.

With Azure backup, there is an on-premises option using your Azure Stack, but my experience on that is limited since I deal with Azure cloud-based backups.

If anyone plans to adopt Azure Backup, first understand your backup requirements. Especially if you operate in a multi-regional environment if your workloads are spread over multiple regions and subscriptions, it makes sense to have a cloud-based backup on Azure, especially if you operate in a multi-regional environment. That helps you scale out as required and simplifies the deployment of web-based or Azure-native applications. The word of caution is to be vigilant about your backup consumption and be proactive in choosing the right tier so that it remains cost-effective for you.

I rate Azure Backup an eight out of ten. The solution is great with cloud-native applications. But if you go into a hybrid environment or a multi-cloud environment, that's when there are complexities. Moreover, you need to be vigilant about what you're using. Otherwise, the cost can spiral out of control.

With Azure Backup, you can readily make your environment if your setup somehow fails on the cloud or on-premises. You can immediately get your system from the backups within five or ten minutes.

While Azure Backup allows ingress data, the egress data is chargeable, which should be excluded. Our clients mostly complain that taking a backup with Azure Backup is free, but retrieving the backup from Azure is chargeable.

It is easy to back up small data and run your system in Azure Backup. After your system is ready, you have to sync your system with Azure Backup, which costs more. There are two segments of people. One segment is happy because they got the emergency recovery of their system. They mention that they feel better if they have to pay for the backup or the egress data because their system is okay. Some people are unhappy because their backup is available, but they have to pay for it. Only a small portion (around 20-30 %) of people fall into this segment, but most are happy.

I have been using Azure Backup for almost more than five years.

The solution's stability and performance are good, except for an issue with its servers.

Azure Backup is a scalable solution.

The problem with technical support is the same for all Microsoft products. Azure Backup's technical support team responds well to severe cases. Their response is too much slow for a non-severe case due to being overwhelmed by severe cases. The support team rarely responds to less severe cases; sometimes, it takes two or three days for them to respond. The support team complies with the SLA for severe cases, but sometimes they fail to do it.

Neutral

Azure Backup has the most user-friendly interface compared to AWS, Google Workspace, or Google Cloud. The Azure platform is much easier to work with than AWS and Google Cloud.

The setup for insight cloud backup is easy. However, site recovery from on-premise to the cloud can be tough because we have to set a lot of parameters.

The initial syncing process is tough in case of site recovery. However, it performs better once your system is synced. It is difficult in specific situations, like if you stop syncing, if storage is full, or if your on-premises server storage is full. The initial setup is difficult for site recovery and backup. It becomes easy once the initial backup is completed.

We strongly recommend to our clients that if they already have a primary backup system, it is advisable to complement it with a cloud or secondary backup for added safety. This is crucial because your backup could crash at any moment due to malware. We recommend all our partners and clients have a cloud backup.

We advise our clients to keep a backup on Azure Backup Cloud. We suggest financial organizations keep a tertiary backup. It would be helpful if the solution introduced a reserve system for backup. The clients would only pay for storage and backup service price. They need to reduce prices so that more people would use cloud backup.

Although some customers already have an on-premises backup for their environment, offering a slightly lower price and the option for one-year and three-year reserve systems may draw more people to opt for secondary backup on the cloud.

Overall, I rate Azure Backup an eight and a half out of ten.

Our company was facing a lot of difficulties maintaining the servers, and we did not have a solid backup solution. So, we moved to Azure.

The product is very reliable and easy to use. Microsoft tools are very user-friendly.

The product could improve its performance.

I used the solution in my previous organization for about two years.

The tool had stability issues. The support team took care of it.

The tool is easily scalable since it is cloud-based. Around 1500 people were using the solution in our organization.

The support was superb. Whenever we had any issues, we called the support team.

Positive

The installation was easy. We took two to three months to deploy the solution. We had to plan since we had a lot of servers.

We had a partner who assisted us in installing the solution. We had a SPOC who was taking care of everything. We required two or three people on the back end to deploy the product. The partner assisted us, and we did the planning and strategy. The solution was easy to maintain. We needed two people to maintain it.

The product is neither too expensive nor too cheap. It is moderately priced. We pay a monthly subscription fee for the solution. We have to pay additionally for the ticket cost for support. We also have to pay for any extra services that we avail.

The solution is neither better nor worse than other products. It is on the cloud, so we don't have any backup appliances on-premises. The drawback is that it relies on network bandwidth and other factors for recovery. If we had a backup appliance on-premise, it would be easy to recover.

We had branch offices in India, headquarters in Hong Kong, and multiple offices in Singapore, the UK, and the US. All the branches were using Azure.

People who want a purely cloud-based solution can use the product. People who want a hybrid solution must consider other vendors. Though Azure has secondary data on the cloud, it still recommends using some third-party tools like Veeam and Commvault. Having data on Azure and backup data on another third-party vendor is fair enough.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.