Azure Backup Reviews

Azure Backup is a mandatory service. We have recommended every client to use Azure Backup. Many resources and databases are being backed up on Azure in different zones and regions.

We have multiple clients. Some of them have data centers. They have 100 to 200 virtual machines. We have set backups, snapshots, and replication for every machine in different zones.

Our client’s infrastructure is protected by the tool.

The product must improve on a database level. It should be made more application-aware.

I have been using the solution for one year.

If we have zone-redundant architecture, the stability is ten out of ten. If not, then it will be an eight out of ten. Overall, I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten. Our clients are small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses.

Sometimes, we meet technically sound people. Sometimes, we don’t. The support team calls within 30 minutes if we launch a ticket. The support team should contain more highly technical people. Overall, the support is good.

Positive

The tool is very easy to deploy and configure. A person who understands networks can deploy and configure the product very easily. If a person has a clear concept of networks, they can work on any cloud solution. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. We have many clients.

We have replicated our clients’ resources from on-premise to cloud and from cloud to cloud. The time taken for deployment varies for every client. If a company has 100 VMs, the tool can be deployed in two days. We can configure the tool with Azure CLI.

It is a very cheap cloud solution.

The solution is improving day by day. New features are introduced, and existing features are updated regularly. Oracle and Azure have some partnerships. They have signed an agreement. Some of our clients have data centers, and we configure their applications on Azure cloud. Azure clients also want to configure their applications in different zones and regions. Azure Backup is good. It can protect the resources of a company. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

The product is cost-effective compared to other vendors.

Azure Backup must include features similar to enterprise solutions, such as Veeam.

I have been using Azure Backup for five years. We are using the latest version.

The product is stable. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

We cater this product to small, medium, and enterprise businesses. I rate its scalability a five out of ten.

The initial setup has medium complexity. I rate the process a five or six out of ten.

The product's pricing is a three or four out of ten, where one is inexpensive, and ten is costly.

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

Azure Backup is very simple to use and user-friendly. From the technical side, features like the tenant and the restoration part are much better. It's a Microsoft tool, and all the info we have based on the VMs will be built on the Azure platform. It's easy for us to do the backup in its OEM tool.

Azure Backup has some drawbacks. We can't have the granular level restoration, particularly for the Azure files. Sometimes, indexing doesn't happen in the Azure files. That's why we are keen to have a solution that can consider all the applications, all the OS, and the legacy applications.

One of the disadvantages of Azure Backup is that it doesn't have a MAC backup. In Azure, we cannot take the MAC backup for Mac devices.

Azure Backup's licensing model is very challenging because it doesn't give a clear picture. Whenever we go to the vendor or the OEM to buy some of the workloads, we have to take everything. We have to pay for the VMs and the storage in the Azure platform. Hence, the licensing model should be very simple for the end user to get things easily.

I have been working with Azure Backup for three years.

I rate Azure Backup a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Azure Backup an eight and a half out of ten for scalability. Two thousand five hundred users use the solution in my company.

We have partner support from Azure Backup. Usually, we can see support in the stipulated time. We get the support based on the SLA timeline.

Positive

Since Azure Backup is a very user-friendly solution, its initial setup is very simple and shouldn't be a challenge for anyone.

We implemented the solution through our technical team.

We do not have any additional costs for Azure Backup.

Sometimes the solution has a huge bandwidth. However, it lags and does not completely perform when it has low bandwidth.

We have around 11 people involved in the maintenance of Azure Backup. Out of these 11 people, five people are from the solution architecture, and the rest are tech support partners.

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

We use this solution for across-the-board data protection. That includes VMs, and storage pools for basically any level of recoverability whether for files, storage pools or transactional data. I'm an enterprise architect. 

Backup helps quite a bit in terms of immediate recovery and immediate restoration. It's very helpful when it comes to data corruption, file damage, or inadvertent deletions. The other component is the relatively broad data protection we get across the entire Azure landing zone. It backs up efficiently and reports better than a lot of traditional tools. 

I think the extensibility onto hybrid environments needs a bit of tweaking. It's great in the cloud but when you're on-prem it requires quite a bit of infrastructure in terms of Azure ARC and bringing it back. 

I've been using this solution for around four years. 

The solution is quite stable and reliable. We've had a few little nominal outages, but nothing terrible. It's much more reliable than any of the traditional on-premise kind of private cloud environments. 

The solution is very scalable for us but scalability depends on your location.There are no problems accessing Azure in Europe or North America but if you're looking at the newer regions, they're slower in adding the same capability. I used Azure in Dublin because there was no Azure in Africa. When they turned on Azure in South Africa we had to switch to that but we only got 50% of the functionality. South Africa should have been brought to the same level before we had to make the move from Dublin. It's taken us backward. 

The initial setup is fairly standard and not too complex. Deployment generally takes a few days depending on the size. Anything to do with data retention takes more time as we have to define the backup schedules and retention and those kinds of things. Validating the backups is quick and efficient but determining which data we need to keep and for how long, takes time. Those are all issues related to the customer.

Deployment steps are basically about carrying out an inventory of the workloads. You want to guard the types of protection you're applying specifically to databases versus different systems and services, and then how that ties into full recoverability. That would take a week maximum in the worst case and we do that internally. 

We usually have two systems engineers involved in maintenance. Different projects require different capacities.

ROI is very good as long as you modernize your solutions and then it brings quite a saving. If you don't upgrade to cloud, and you just do a lift and shift, it'll kill you with the cost.

Licensing costs are consumption-based so the more storage we eat, the more data we protect, the greater the cost.

It's important to ensure that the capabilities you require are available in your region. Feature availability per region is the most important thing. You can't do a design for Azure in North America and then think that it's going to work everywhere. Azure is not consistent so you may be forced to buy third-party products that you didn't budget for.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Customers nowadays are planning to migrate their workloads from on-premises to the cloud, like Azure. Microsoft offers Azure Backup as a service, which allows backup for virtual machines, SQL databases, HANA databases, and even file shares. 

If the customer's workloads are supported by Azure, we recommend Azure Backup as a service. However, for workloads not supported by Azure Backup, we look for third-party investment solutions.

One notable feature is that snapshots are computed in less time, enabling faster system recovery. Even for large systems, we can recover them in less time. For example, if it's a recent backup, it can be done in less than 15 minutes.

Another benefit is that the backup utilization is not high. Comparing the pricing with other technologies, Azure Backup is more affordable for customers.

One feature is VMware backup with replication. Many customers are interested in this. Additionally, Azure Backup allows customers to extend their retention period for more than five or ten years, which is beneficial compared to other enterprise backup solutions. The monitoring capability is also good. 

Moreover, encryption is maintained by Microsoft if we follow the platform team management system. This is crucial as customers want to ensure the security of their data on Azure. The configuration is user-friendly, and we have control over backup storage utilization and VM consumption. 

When it comes to improvements, Microsoft should provide us with an option to explore the logs. So if there's any failure by seeing the error, in some cases, we will be able to resolve it. But 50% of the cases are being handled by Microsoft itself, like getting the logs from the back end. That's the one thing that I've seen that has to be enhanced from Microsoft's end.

Azure Backup is limited to certain workloads. It would be helpful if Microsoft focused on enabling backups for Oracle and other unsupported databases.

We have multiple customers, and we categorize the Commvault infrastructure based on customer mix. We have more than ten Comsources, and we distribute the load accordingly. Based on client utilization, we configure the backup equally across the media agents.

The stability is good. I didn't find any challenges. The installations also work as expected. The customers do not have any concerns about it.

Customer service and support vary based on the issue. I've had personal experiences where some issues took more than fifteen days to resolve while others were resolved in one or two days. Overall, it's good, but there is room for improvement based on my personal experience.

The initial setup is very simple. We have to have an idea of the networking cost structure and the configuration. We also have to get confirmation from the customer about what kind of retention they are looking for.

We can also have the data deployed to other regions, which is a nice feature. If there is any disaster in the primary region, we'll be able to read the data from a secondary region. That's also one of the very good features offered by Azure Backup. 

The deployment process is quite easy in Azure. Enabling backup for any VM takes less than five minutes. We just need to create a vault and discover the VM for backup. So, in terms of deployment, it's straightforward and user-friendly.

I haven't found the need for much maintenance. In comparison to other backup solutions where we maintain our own infrastructure, Azure Backup handles everything. We simply create a library, assign a policy, and associate the VM with the trusted backup vault. Microsoft manages everything, and there are no limitations in terms of storage utilization.

Comparing the pricing with other technologies, Azure Backup is more affordable for customers. It follows a pay-as-you-go model, where we pay according to our consumption.

In terms of Azure Backup, there is no special license required. We only need to pay for the amount of data we consume and the data transferred across the network. The pricing is calculated based on these two factors. There is no explicit license cost. We just need to allocate a budget for storage and related expenses.

When it comes to advice, it's important to understand the specific requirements of the customer. If the customer requires backups for VMs, SQL, and SAP HANA, Microsoft's Azure Backup can be a suitable choice. 

However, if there are other workloads that are not supported by Microsoft, alternative backup solutions should be considered. The decision depends on the specific requirements. Azure Backup offers services related to cost, storage utilization, encryption, and scalability.

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

We have implemented a secondary contingency plan for most clients, where the primary infrastructure is on-premise, and the containers are hosted in the cloud. Some clients are currently migrating their primary solutions to the cloud. In these cases, the servers run on Azure, and Azure Backup provides backup server services. Additionally, we have implemented Azure SQL and Azure Intune for these clients.

The daily backups have become easier since we no longer need to handle large backups. The use of Azure Backup as a service has proven reliable and simplified our daily operations. Previously, we relied on LTO backups for data retention, but after migrating to the cloud and adopting Azure Backup, the delivery process has become smoother.

The simplicity of the whole operation is the most valuable feature of the solution.

I believe more options could be available to understand better what's happening in the system. Additionally, automating the client updates and connector updates would be beneficial. Updating the connector from time to time can be challenging, and it could be made more transparent and straightforward for users. Moreover, another drawback lies in the time it takes to test full data backup recovery. Deploying a full recovery takes longer. We need to allocate a longer period for complete data recovery to establish the environment again.

I have been using the solution for the past four years.

I rate the stability of the solution as a nine out of ten.

In a fully cloud-based solution, scalability is good, and I rate it a ten out of ten. On the other hand, for an on-premise setup, there may be challenges related to recovery and the potential impact on the Internet link's bandwidth. Therefore, I rate it an eight out of ten.

I believe Microsoft could improve its backup support.

Neutral

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing of the solution does not depend on the service itself but rather on the minimum data volume encountered. This pricing approach seems reasonable and is on par with other competitors in the market. It is a good solution for on-premise needs because it is more cost-effective. When evaluating the overall financial expenditure, including operational costs and the impact on the IT team, Azure Backup is a favorable choice.

I recommend it; however, I want to emphasize the importance of thoroughly checking if the cloud backup solution aligns with the required time frame for recovery. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case is for backups.

The solution helped us use R2 RBO to back up frequently and avoid losing data if we had system issues.

The most valuable features are the integrations because we are using Azure Cloud, which backs it up with all the Azure components.

Azure Backup is constantly improving its features. However, it can be further improved by continuously meeting its compliance requirements.

We have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Azure Backup to backup VMs.

The most valuable feature of Azure Backup is its ease of use and good integration with other Azure services.

The Azure Backup support for on-premises service is limited.

The file-level restore procedure should be more straightforward.

I have been using Azure Backup for approximately three years.

Azure Backup is stable.

Azure Backup can scale and it is easy to do.

The initial setup of Azure Backup is straightforward. It took 15 minutes to do the deployment.

I rate the initial setup of Azure Backup a four out of five.

I did the implementation of the solution.

I rate Azure Backup a seven out of ten.