Azure Backup Integration

Editor's Notes

• #4: The game is always changing for small and midsize organizations as major technology trends continue to transform the business landscape. The move to the cloud There is a continued move toward greater use of cloud services as more organizations seek to take advantage of the reduced capital costs and major time-savings of using a hosted platform for their IT services on a “pay-as-you-go” service model. According to AMI Research, small and midsize business (SMB) spending on hosted services is growing 24% annually1. Skyrocketing mobile & remote usage For most SMBs, a mobile and remote workforce has become the norm today. More employees are working from home and on the road—and using a growing assortment of mobile devices to do this work. It is estimated that 85% of SMBs have employees using smartphones at work2. Tablet use is growing fast—already in use at work by 25% of SMBs2. 43% say they have some portion of their workforce telecommuting2. Mobility creates a number of business benefits with greater speed and improved productivity, but it also create new challenges in supporting multiple devices and securing data. Using data to compete With an increasingly competitive business environment, SMBs are always seeking new ways to differentiate themselves with customers and stay ahead of the competition. In an AMI Research study, SMBs cited “improving customer experience” as the number one planned activity looking ahead3. Many are recognizing the value of data in helping differentiate their business—for example, by better understanding customer preferences and delivering improved service, or reaching prospects with the right marketing and sales messages. There is useful data everywhere—both inside and outside of the organization. The challenge is making it easy to put that data to use to achieve business goals. Sources: 1 AMI WW Market Opportunity Model: 2012-2017. Includes SaaS/IaaS/Related spending, but excludes web hosting. 2 AMI WW Market Opportunity Model: 2012-2017 and AMI ICT Tracker survey data Tablet & smartphone penetrations shown as % of all businesses. Mobile workers, telecommuters, BI penetration shown % of PC SMBs. 3 AMI ICT Tracking Studies, U.S. SMB Trends & Server Market Insights, March 14, 2013.
• #5: In response to all these changes, many small and midsize businesses are focused on three key areas: Doing more with less—In today’s business environment, doing “more with less” has become the new normal. To stay ahead of the game, it is imperative to get the most out of every investment. When it comes to your technology investments, this means cutting costs wherever possible and getting the most value out of the products and services you purchase. It means creating a foundation that will grow with your business and set you up for the future. Getting the job done, wherever you are—As the division between our personal and business lives blurs, employees expect to be able to work anywhere—whether on their PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. SMBs need to enable this mobility, while making sure their data is kept safe. Focusing your efforts to win business—Most businesses recognize that they have a massive amount of useful data in a range of disparate sources, such as customer databases, accounting systems, and product data. But it is often challenging for employees to access the data they need and to put it to use to make sales and better service customers. Those businesses who can use information to their advantage will win customers and keep them.
• #7: Protect your data Simplified backups. Enjoy peace of mind with daily, automatic backups of every computer on your network and the server itself. With the growing number of remote workers and more devices, automatic backups can help provide peace of mind. Built-in disaster recovery. Be protected from fire, theft, or flood. Even if your hardware fails, Microsoft’s online backup service helps you keep your data safe and secure in the cloud. In a fast-paced environment, you need a solution that can keep up with you and get you up and running quickly. You don’t want to risk having downtime impact your customers. Centralized IT management. Save time by managing your devices through a single IT dashboard designed to easily handle common tasks and address IT issues before they occur. Make sure software, anti-virus tools, and backups are active and up-to-date, control who has access to what documents, and that you don’t run out of storage space. Get even more out of your IT investments when combined with Windows 8.x. The Dashboard is a simple tool designed to help small businesses like yours keep up with the growing demands of your tech savvy team members. Provide secure remote access Consistent productivity. Quickly connect to the computers in your network and access all your files and apps from virtually any location, just as if you were sitting in your office. Save time looking for scattered files with the powerful and centralized data storage and sharing features. As the line between people’s life and work gets blurred, you need a solution that supports individual work styles and helps them get the job done from virtually anywhere. Easy connectivity. Stay connected to the tools you use most with access to your email, calendar, and contacts by using Windows Small Business Server together with Office 365, Hosted Exchange, or Exchange Server running on a second server. As your team continues to be more and more on the go, they expect to have access to the tools they need to get their jobs done. Increase security. Stay productive by protecting your computers against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other potentially unwanted software by leveraging Windows Defender through the server. Protect your devices with automatic backup and security features that function when away from the office. Enhanced security continues to be top of mind when evaluating the solution. Integrate cloud services Business agility. Increase productivity and collaborate with customers, vendors, and partners using a broad range of cloud-based services, without losing control over, or the security of, your confidential information and documents. This is a great scenario that you can customize to their industry – for example, maybe they have clients they share files with, vendors they bring on seasonally, or have sensitive data such as confidential client records or secret sauce recipes, that they want only certain people to access. Flexible cloud solutions. Enjoy the flexibility to choose the right solution for your business’s needs, with seamless integration and centralized administration of cloud services and on-premises applications. Here, you can provide an example based on the students’ familiarity and use of the cloud, and help them understand what they next step could be. Powerful partnership. When combined with Office 365, Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials gives you a variety of secure cloud-based collaboration options while providing a single, easy-to-use dashboard to manage them all. You can work seamlessly with the programs you know and use most, including Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This can be a great example of the cloud connection for their business because most small businesses are familiar with the programs such as Word and Excel. You can then highlight how the familiarity of the solutions help ensure the solution is easy-to-use.
• #8: Key Message: Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials makes it easy to take advantage of Hyper-V Replica when deployed as a virtual machine. Current situation Business continuity is the ability to quickly recover business functions from a downtime event with minimal or no data loss. There are number of reasons why businesses experience outage including power failure, IT hardware failure, network outage, human errors, IT software failures, and natural disasters. Depending on the type of outage, customers need a high availability solution that simply restores the service. However, some outages that impact the entire data center, such as a natural disaster or an extended power outage, require a disaster recovery solution that restores data at a remote site in addition to bringing up the services and connectivity. Organizations need an affordable and reliable business continuity solution that helps them recover from a failure. Before Windows Server 2012 Beginning with Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper‑V and Failover Clustering can be used together to make a virtual machine highly available and minimize disruptions. Administrators can seamlessly migrate their virtual machines to a different host in the cluster in the event of an outage or to load balance their virtual machines without impacting virtualized applications. Although this can protect virtualized workloads from a local host failure or scheduled maintenance of a host in a cluster, this does not protect businesses from outage of an entire data center. Failover Clustering can be used with hardware-based SAN replication across data centers, but these are typically expensive. Hyper‑V Replica fills an important gap in the Windows Server Hyper‑V offering by providing an affordable in-box disaster recovery solution. Windows Server 2012 Hyper‑V Replica Windows Server 2012 introduces Hyper‑V Replica, a built-in feature that provides asynchronous replication of virtual machines for the purposes of business continuity and disaster recovery. In the event of failures (such as power failure, fire, or natural disaster) at the primary site, the administrator can manually fail over the production virtual machines to the Hyper‑V server at the recovery site. During failover, the virtual machines are brought back to a consistent point in time, and within minutes they can be accessed by the rest of the network with minimal impact to the business. After the primary site comes back, the administrators can manually revert the virtual machines to the Hyper‑V server at the primary site. Hyper‑V Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2012. It lets you replicate your Hyper‑V virtual machines over a network link from one Hyper‑V host at a primary site to another Hyper‑V host at a replica site without reliance on storage arrays or other software replication technologies. The figure shows secure replication of virtual machines from different systems and clusters to a remote site over a WAN. Benefits of Hyper‑V Replica Hyper‑V Replica fills an important gap in the Windows Server Hyper‑V offering by providing an affordable in-box business continuity and disaster recovery solution. Failure recovery in minutes. In the event of an unplanned shutdown, Hyper‑V Replica can restore your system in just minutes. More secure replication across the network. Hyper‑V Replica tracks the write operations on the primary virtual machine and replicates these changes to the replica server efficiently over a WAN. The network connection between the two servers uses the HTTP or HTTPS protocol and supports both integrated and certificate-based authentication. Connections configured to use integrated authentication are not encrypted; for an encrypted connection, you should choose certificate-based authentication. Hyper‑V Replica is closely integrated with Windows Failover Clustering and provides easier replication across different migration scenarios in the primary and replica servers. Hyper‑V Replica doesn’t rely on storage arrays. Hyper‑V Replica doesn’t rely on other software replication technologies. Hyper‑V Replica automatically handles live migration. Configuration and management are simpler with Hyper‑V Replica: Integrated user interface (UI) with Hyper‑V Manager. Failover Cluster Manager snap-in for Microsoft Management Console (MMC). Extensible Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface. Windows PowerShell command-line interface scripting capability.
• #9: Key Message: Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials integrates the management of Windows Azure Backup into the Dashboard console. Windows Azure Backup helps protect server data against loss and corruption by enabling backup to offsite cloud storage in Windows Azure. It provides a consistent experience configuring, monitoring, and recovering backups across local disk and cloud storage, integrating with the in-box backup program in Windows Server or System Center Data Protection Manager. Windows Azure Backup encrypts and protects your backups in offsite cloud storage with Windows Azure, adding a layer of protection in case data loss or disaster impacts your servers. Windows Azure Backup can integrate with the backup tools in Windows Server or System Center Data Protection Manager. You can manage cloud backups from these familiar tools to configure, monitor, and recover backups across local disk and cloud storage with ease. Windows Azure Backup delivers efficient data protection. It minimizes network bandwidth use, provides flexible data retention policies, and provides a cost-effective data protection solution. Convenient offsite protection: Windows Azure Backup provides convenient, automated offsite data protection. Local backups leave data vulnerable to unfortunate events such as fire. Continuously migrating backup media offsite can be inconvenient. Windows Azure Backup stores data safely away from your premises, reducing the need to secure and protect onsite backup media. Safe data: Data stored in Windows Azure is geo-replicated among Windows Azure data centers, for additional protection. Encrypted backups: Your data is encrypted before it leaves your premises, and remains encrypted in Windows Azure – only you have the key. Familiar interface: Small businesses protecting a single server, or a few servers, can use the familiar in-box backup tool to protect data – manually or on a regular, automated schedule. Larger organizations with System Center 2012 can use the Data Protection Manager component to centrally manage backups across multiple servers. Windows Azure integration: Windows Azure Backup is fully integrated with the Azure Management Portal for sign-up, billing, and web-based management. Efficient use of bandwidth and storage: Both WAN bandwidth and Windows Azure storage are conserved by sending only changes to files with incremental backups. Flexibility in recovery: Incremental backups provide multiple versions of data for point-in-time recovery. Plus you can recover just what you need with file-level recovery. Flexible configuration: Configurable data retention policies, data compression, and data transfer throttling provide for both flexible backup policies and backup efficiency. Cost-effective: Control costs by reducing the need for local storage and offsite media management, while benefiting from simple storage-based pricing with no per-server or data transfer fees.