Microsoft has increased the lifetime of Azure Site Recovery points from 72 hours to 15 days.
The change is useful for customers worried about the threat of ransomware that might go undetected for a few days before it is deployed, necessitating the use of an older recovery point.
Azure has had built-in disaster recovery for a few years now, and it naturally comes at a price. The first 31 days are free, but after that expect to start paying per instance protected. Users of the UK South region, for example, can expect to pay £11.948 per month per instance for Azure Site Recovery to customer-owned sites or £18.668 per month per instance to Azure. For Central US, it’s $16/month per instance for customer-owned sites or $25/month to Azure. And even though those first 31 days are free, there could well be charges for services such as Azure Storage and data transfers.
You will also need to set up the service correctly to avoid an unexpected bill in your inbox.
Still, who could put a price on peace of mind, right?
The latest announcement concerns the replication policies that govern the retention history. According to Microsoft: “You can now retain recovery points up to 15 days instead of 72 hours. Recovery points will be retained at a frequency of 5 mins for the first 2 hours. Subsequently, recovery points will be pruned and stored at a lesser frequency.”
Application-consistent recovery points, disabled by default, can also be enabled.
There are also some gotchas. If you want to go back 15 days, you’ll need to go down the path of Managed Disks. Unmanaged will only get you three days. Unsurprisingly, storage costs will also jump since you’re saving more recovery points.
As for what “lesser frequency” means, in Microsoft’s documentation the definition is that after those first two hours, one recovery point is saved per hour. For two days onward the frequency is every two hours. And for 8-15 days, pruning will leave one recovery point saved per four hours. ®
Azure Site Recovery points now live for 15 days in case undetonated ransomware lurks
Source: Expert Gwapo Pinoys
0 Comments