Chapter 13. Backup, recovery, and replication
The next few chapters introduce some of the core Azure features and services that allow you to build security into your applications. That’s probably too subjective: security shouldn’t be an add-on feature or consideration. Rather, security should be inherently built into the heart and soul of your application from the start. In this chapter, you begin your journey into Azure security with how to back up and recover your data. Backups may not seem like a common security topic, but think about security as more than data encryption or website SSL certificates. What about the safety of your data from outages, data loss, and hacking? A discussion of backups and replication also acts as a good topic to bridge from the previous section on high availability into this section on security.
Backups may seem trivial, and as a former backup administrator, I can tell you there isn’t much exciting about backup jobs and rotations! But timely backups that work are crucial to protect your applications and ensure that in the worst-case scenario, you can restore your data quickly and reliably. You can also replicate your VMs from one Azure region to another. This ability builds on the high-availability concepts we looked at back in chapter 7.
In this chapter, you learn how to back up and restore VMs and then replicate VMs automatically across Azure. All these backups and restore points are encrypted to secure your data.