 Hi everybody and welcome to this video series covering business continuity with Azure. Today, we're going to be talking about backup. Backup is really just a copy of your data taken and stored somewhere else, and that's in case something happens to your production environment, be that someone just deleting a file or a folder by mistake or something more malicious happening. Now, over my career, I've seen backup solutions change and evolve. When I first started working in IT, we were using physical tape drives. I was in charge of changing those tapes, of transporting those tapes to other locations that were protected against anything happening. Eventually, we started to see this backup solution change. It was starting to go with storage, so rather than using tapes for the backup destination, we were using storage and then eventually things started to change, where we're now seeing people use Cloud-only solutions and use leverage Cloud just as their backup solution or they're using a hybrid solution, where some stuff is getting backed up on-prem and other stuff is getting backed up in the Cloud. Now, I've been talking to a customer called Tailwind Traders, and they're having some issues with their backup solution. They have different locations within their offices, and they really need a reliable and consistent experience for their backup solution. Tailwind Traders have offices, as I said, in different locations. Their head office is in Scotland, and they're still using tape drives for their backup solution, but the tape drives are starting to get really old now. They're starting to cause some issues, both the hardware's eating the tape sometimes or not doing what it needs to do in order to do the backup. So it's not a great experience for the company at the moment. Also, in the Singapore office, they don't have any IT staff, so often the person in that office is forgetting to actually change the tapes, or they've actually on a current occasion, lose the tape. So backups are getting lost or missed, and again, it's not a great experience for them. Now, this is Tailwind Traders' current setup. As I said, they had their head office in Scotland, which is where the main IT infrastructure lives and the IT department, and then they have offices in Dubai and Singapore, which have a cut-down version of that IT infrastructure, and as the offices are slightly smaller. Now, they've asked me to come up with a solution to try and fix some of their backup problems. So I'm going to suggest that we actually utilize Azure Backup as the new way going forward, how they backup their solutions on-prem. So I'm suggesting Azure Backup for a few reasons. Now, Azure Backup is the native backup solution within Azure. It isn't just for cloud products, though. It can help with backup on-prem as well, which is great because Tailwind Traders have all their IT infrastructure on-prem at the moment. Azure Backup leverages Azure, which allows us to have unlimited scale and not think about things like maintenance and hardware replacements. That's all taken care of by the Azure Data Center team. We also don't have to think about right now really the number or the amount of storage that we have to have. Now, often when you're designing an on-prem backup solution, one of the first things you have to do is calculate how much backup storage you need so that you don't over-provision storage or you don't under-provision storage. We don't really need to think about that number as such. Yes, we do from a price point, but in terms of scalability, we don't because we only pay for the data that we use and as the backup footprint grows, we can just scale out into the Azure platform and utilize that. We don't have to have that limit right now and understand where our growth is going to go to a full extent. Now, we all know that malware, ransomware and intrusion attacks can affect live and backup systems and that's not great. However, Azure Backup has security features built into it that can help us guard against those attacks, both from a prevention, alerting and recovery standpoint. Azure Backup utilizes Azure Storage as its storage location and because of that, we can take advantage of the encryption that Azure Storage has. So at rest, Azure Storage encrypts everything at 256-bit AES encryption, which is one of the strongest block ciphers available. Also when we're transporting our data from on-prem up into Azure, we will be doing that over a secure connection as well. And like I said, the flexibility of Azure Backup is just great because we can have up to 9,999 recovery points per protected instance. So there's lots of scale here and we can cover what Tailwind traders need in terms of protection and compliance for some of their audits. So one of the first things that we want to do for this new solution and to implement it into Tailwind traders infrastructure is actually to build a backup server within each of the locations. Now, each of these servers has been allocated some local storage and we'll be leveraging that so that we can do what's called a short-term backup on those local servers. And that's really just to cover us for a number of days worth of backups on-prem so that if the help desk get a phone call where someone's accidentally deleted files or folders, we can quickly pull them back. We don't have to use the internet connection or Azure to pull them back because we've got that local short-term backup on-prem. Once we've got the backup servers in place, the next thing we want to do is actually create our Azure Recovery Services vaults and that's where our backup data is going to reside within Azure. Now, we've spun up three of these vaults and we've done that so that we can take advantage of the local data centers to our offices and also make sure that we're not transporting data outside of the country that the office lives in in case of any compliance or regulatory reasons. So for the Scotland office, we're going to utilize the UK South data center. For Dubai, we're going to use UA North. For Singapore, we're going to use the Southeast Asia data center as well. Now, each of these Recovery Services vaults have been configured to utilize something called GRS storage. Now that's geo-redundant storage. What that gives us is a copy within our chosen Azure data center and also a copy within the secondary Azure data center in that same country. In case there was something happens to a primary or a chosen Azure data center and that's again just for another level of protection for tailwind traders data. So now that those Recovery Vaults are set up, we can actually start to look at connecting our backup servers to these Recovery Services vaults and setting up what servers are going to be protected, how often we're going to send data there and how long we want to keep all of that. So we can set up all those retention policies and recovery data points. This new solution allows tailwind traders to scale so they can scale up in terms of backup data or even they can scale down quite easily again because we're only paying for what storage we use. The IT can manage it from all from Scotland. They can access this all remotely. They don't have to rely on the individuals in some of their branch offices to change tapes. All of that is done through Azure. They can manage that and it's also secure. So meaning that their data is secure and safe from attackers or attacks. If you want to learn more, we have some great documentation on our official Microsoft Docs website. And if you head over to aka.ms.bc backup, you can read more about it and some of the information that I've talked about today. We also have a Microsoft Learn module where you can dive in and actually get some hands-on experience of using Azure Backup. And you can leverage that at aka.ms.bc.ms.bc.ms.bc backup. Thank you for tuning in today and hopefully we'll catch you in another one of our video series.