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Azure Backup makes a great case for moving on-premises tape and disk infrastructure to the cloud. As with all cloud solutions, it is cost effective, with a pay-as-you-go model and no upfront costs. But unlike other cloud-connect strategies, Azure Backup is built as a cloud-first software as a service.

This model has several advantages. The service comes with 99.9 percent availability time. As users create a backup vault to store data, the data is stored in geo-replicated storage, protecting it from disasters. Even if there is an outage of one of the Azure datacenters, the data is accessible.

But it is not sufficient for the data to be geo-redundant; the service that enables access to data should also be geo-redundant. Azure Backup is available in two or more regions per geography and has a built-in business continuity plan so that even when the primary Azure datacenter experiences an outage, the service fails over to a new datacenter. Therefore, regardless of whether the organization loses on-premises data or whether the Azure datacenter has an outage, both the data and the backup service are available for customers to retrieve their data. If Azure fails over to a secondary data center, customers are able to browse all the recovery points associated with backup, pick any recovery point, and perform a restore, as well as continue backing up data to the service post failover.

With Azure Backup, backed up data is always encrypted on both the wire and at rest on Azure such that it is always secure before it leaves the on-premises datacenter. The Azure Backup service also maintains backup metadata that enables customers to restore data anywhere from Azure to an alternate Windows-based or DPM server.

Source of Information : Microsoft System Center