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Need a Low-Cost Solution for Offsite Disaster Recovery?

Erick Wilkins

Aug 7 2019

3 min read

Azure Site Recovery might be your affordable answer. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) can be used to replicate your on-premises or even other cloud-based servers to Azure for the purpose of providing you a low-cost offsite Disaster Recovery solution.

Both physical and virtual servers can be replicated to Azure using ASR. The only monthly costs you incur are a small fee per server and storage costs related to the amount of disk space used on the servers. You won’t be charged for the usual virtual server consumption costs until you actually fail-over in a disaster recovery scenario. At the time of failing over you can select the virtual server size and disk storage type to further control your costs and ensure you have the performance you need to run your business-critical applications in Azure.

Failing-over can be as easy as clicking a button and can happen within minutes depending on the number of servers and the fail-over plan you create ahead of time. Test fail-overs can be performed at any time without interfering with your production on-premises servers. You can even use this environment to perform test upgrades of your applications, then reset the replicated data back to where it was before you started testing. If a disaster does strike that forces you to fail-over to Azure, you can reverse the replication to failback to your on-premises hardware once you are ready to do so.

Some key benefits of using ASR is that there is never a need to upgrade the hardware used or spend time patching operating systems for your disaster recovery solution either on-premises or at a colocation facility. If you already have your servers hosted in Azure, you can still use ASR to replicate those servers to an entirely different Azure region.

ASR is the same tool used to permanently migrate servers into the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This gives you the added flexibility to start off using it for DR purposes, then later if you decide to make the permanent switch to Azure, you can do so without any additional work.

Most companies that think they have a DR plan have never tested it due to the complexity, costs and downtime associated with doing so. ASR gives you the low-cost, ease of use and peace of mind knowing that whatever happens to your production servers your users will be able to get back to work from any location as long as they have Internet connectivity.

Have any questions about Azure Site Recovery or anything else about offsite disaster recovery options? Don’t hesitate to contact us at any time!

This publication contains general information only and Sikich is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or any other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should you use it as a basis for any decision, action or omission that may affect you or your business. Before making any decision, taking any action or omitting an action that may affect you or your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. In addition, this publication may contain certain content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) language model. You acknowledge that Sikich shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by you or any person who relies on this publication.

About the Author

Erick Wilkins

Erick is a Senior Network Solutions Architect with Sikich providing designs and proposals for a variety of both on-premises and cloud-based IT solutions. He has over 35-years of experience in IT, starting as a field engineer and moving onto managing a team of engineers, assisting with technical sales and currently focusing on the Microsoft platform, including on-premises solutions, Office 365, and Azure.