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Every solid backup plan has a data retention policy, which specifies how long your organisation stores backup data before either archiving it, overwriting it, or destroying (deleting) it. A data retention policy determines the following:
For some businesses, a data retention policy is required for compliance.
For most companies, a data retention policy is a compliance requirement of regulatory bodies. Even if it’s a requirement, a data retention policy gives administrators guidance on data backups and archives. The process of creating and planning one can help uncover storage issues, authorisation problems and any risks associated with the data. The most prominent reason organisations develop a data retention policy is for compliance. Among other standards that oversee data storage and access, all of the following require organisations to have a retention policy:
Every organisation manages its planning and execution stages differently. But you can follow best practices to ensure that your plan is developed efficiently and smoothly. Having a solid archiving solution can also help simplify your legal discovery, regulatory compliance and user data access. Data retention affects every department in the organisation. So a robust plan can advance the entire company and helps administrators and other IT staff fulfil their service level agreements. Basic steps in the policy-planning and creation phase include:
Data-retention timeframes depend on the sensitivity of the data and compliance requirements. Non-sensitive data must also be stored for a specific amount of time in case users must recover files for business purposes. If compliance standards that oversee your organisation do not have a specific data retention timeframe, it’s up to you to determine the best duration internally. Unimportant data might only have a two-week data retention policy, but critical data such as healthcare information might need to be stored for decades. Retain data long enough to support any disaster recovery plans and for when a backup is used to restore business operations. Storage capacity also factors into retention time. The cost associated with large data archives expands with increased data storage over longer periods of time. If the price of data storage is higher than the cost of losing it, consider deleting it rather than keeping it for months.
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Azure Backup comprehensively protects your data assets in Azure through a simple, secure, and cost-effective solution that requires zero-infrastructure. It's Azure's built-in data protection solution for a wide range of workloads. It helps protect your mission critical workloads running in the cloud, and ensures your backups are always available and managed at scale across your entire backup estate. Intended audienceThe primary target audience for this article is the IT and application administrators, and implementers of large and mid-sized organizations, who want to learn about the capabilities of Azure’s built-in data protection technology, Azure Backup, and to implement solutions to protect your deployments efficiently. The article assumes you're familiar with core Azure technologies, data protection concepts and have experience working with a backup solution. The guidance covered in this article can make it easier to design your backup solution on Azure using established patterns and avoid known pitfalls. How this article is organizedWhile it’s easy to start protecting infrastructure and applications on Azure, when you ensure that the underlying Azure resources are set up correctly and being used optimally you can accelerate your time to value. This article covers a brief overview of design considerations and guidance for optimally configuring your Azure Backup deployment. It examines the core components (for example, Recovery Services vault, Backup Policy) and concepts (for example, governance) and how to think of them and their capabilities with links to detailed product documentation. Get startedApart from having a clear roadmap to navigate through the Cloud Adoption Journey, you must plan your cloud deployment's subscription design and account structure to match your organization's ownership, billing, and management capabilities. As the vault is scoped to a subscription, your Subscription design will highly influence your Vault design. Learn more about different Subscription Design Strategies and guidance on when to use them. Document your Backup requirementsTo get started with Azure Backup, plan your backup needs. Following are some of the questions you should ask yourself while formulating a perfect backup strategy. What workload type do you wish to protect?To design your vaults, ensure if you require a centralized/ decentralized mode of operation. What’s the required backup granularity ?Determine if it should be application consistent, crash consistent, or log backup. Do you’ve any compliance requirements?Ensure if you need to enforce security standards and separate access boundaries. What’s the required RPO, RTO?Determine the backup frequency and the speed of restore. Determine the storage redundancy for the required Data Durability. How long do you want to retain the backup data?Decide on the duration the backed-up data be retained in the storage. Architecture
WorkloadsAzure Backup enables data protection for various workloads (on-premises and cloud). It's a secure and reliable built-in data protection mechanism in Azure. It can seamlessly scale its protection across multiple workloads without any management overhead for you. There are multiple automation channels as well to enable this (via PowerShell, CLI, Azure Resource Manager templates, and REST APIs.)
Learn more about supported workloads. Data plane
Management plane
Azure Backup uses vaults (Recovery Services and Backup vaults) to orchestrate, manage backups, and store backed-up data. Effective vault design helps organizations establish a structure to organize and manage the backup assets in Azure to support your business priorities. Consider the following guidelines when creating a vault. Single or multiple vaultsTo use a single vault or multiple vaults to organize and manage your backup, see the following guidelines:
Review default settingsReview the default settings for Storage Replication type and Security settings to meet your requirements before configuring backups in the vault.
Azure Backup Policy has two components: Schedule (when to take backup) and Retention (how long to retain backup). You can define the policy based on the type of data that's being backed up, RTO/RPO requirements, operational or regulatory compliance needs and workload type (for example, VM, database, files). Learn more Consider the following guidelines when creating Backup Policy: While scheduling your backup policy, consider the following points:
Optimize Backup Policy
To help you protect your backup data and meet the security needs of your business, Azure Backup provides confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances against deliberate attacks and abuse of your valuable data and systems. Consider the following security guidelines for your Azure Backup solution:
Encryption of data in transit and at restEncryption protects your data and helps you to meet your organizational security and compliance commitments.
Protection of backup data from unintentional deletes with soft-deleteYou may encounter scenarios where you’ve mission-critical backup data in a vault, and it gets deleted accidentally or erroneously. Also, a malicious actor may delete your production backup items. It’s often costly and time-intensive to rebuild those resources and can even cause crucial data loss. Azure Backup provides safeguard against accidental and malicious deletion with the Soft-Delete feature by allowing you to recover those resources after they are deleted. With soft-delete, if a user deletes the backup (of a VM, SQL Server database, Azure file share, SAP HANA database), the backup data is retained for 14 additional days, allowing the recovery of that backup item with no data loss. The additional 14 days retention of backup data in the soft delete state doesn't incur any cost. Learn more How would you protect your data if your administrator goes rogue and compromises your system? Any administrator that has the privileged access to your backup data has the potential to cause irreparable damage to the system. A rogue admin can delete all your business-critical data or even turn off all the security measures that may leave your system vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Azure Backup provides you with the Multi-User Authorization (MUA) feature to protect you from such rouge administrator attacks. Multi-user authorization helps protect against a rogue administrator performing destructive operations (that is, disabling soft-delete), by ensuring that every privileged/destructive operation is done only after getting approval from a security administrator. Ransomware Protection
Monitoring and alerts of suspicious activityYou may encounter scenarios where someone tries to breach into your system and maliciously turn off the security mechanisms, such as disabling Soft Delete or attempts to perform destructive operations, such as deleting the backup resources. Azure Backup provides security against such incidents by sending you critical alerts over your preferred notification channel (email, ITSM, Webhook, runbook, and sp pn) by creating an Action Rule on top of the alert. Learn more Security features to help protect hybrid backupsAzure Backup service uses the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent to back up and restore files, folders, and the volume or system state from an on-premises computer to Azure. MARS now provides security features: a passphrase to encrypt before upload and decrypt after download from Azure Backup, deleted backup data is retained for an additional 14 days from the date of deletion, and critical operation (ex. changing a passphrase) can be performed only by users who have valid Azure credentials. Learn more here. Azure Backup requires movement of data from your workload to the Recovery Services vault. Azure Backup provides several capabilities to protect backup data from being exposed inadvertently (such as a man-in-the-middle attack on the network). Consider the following guidelines: Internet connectivity
Private Endpoints for secure accessWhile protecting your critical data with Azure Backup, you wouldn’t want your resources to be accessible from the public internet. Especially, if you’re a bank or a financial institution, you would have stringent compliance and security requirements to protect your High Business Impact (HBI) data. Even in the healthcare industry, there are strict compliance rules. To fulfill all these needs, use Azure Private Endpoint, which is a network interface that connects you privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link. We recommend you to use private endpoints for secure backup and restore without the need to add to an allowlist of any IPs/FQDNs for Azure Backup or Azure Storage from your virtual networks. Learn more about how to create and use private endpoints for Azure Backup inside your virtual networks.
Governance in Azure is primarily implemented with Azure Policy and Azure Cost Management. Azure Policy allows you to create, assign, and manage policy definitions to enforce rules for your resources. This feature keeps those resources in compliance with your corporate standards. Azure Cost Management allows you to track cloud usage and expenditures for your Azure resources and other cloud providers. Also, the following tools such as Azure Price Calculator and Azure Advisor play an important role in the cost management process. Auto-configure newly provisioned backup infrastructure with Azure Policy at Scale
The Azure Backup service offers the flexibility to effectively manage your costs; also, meet your BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery) business requirement. Consider the following guidelines:
As a backup user or administrator, you should be able to monitor all backup solutions and get notified on important scenarios. This section details the monitoring and notification capabilities provided by the Azure Backup service. Monitor
AlertsIn a scenario where your backup/restore job failed due to some unknown issue. To assign an engineer to debug it, you would want to be notified about the failure as soon as possible. There could also be a scenario where someone maliciously performs a destructive operation, such as deleting backup items or turning off soft-delete, and you would require an alert message for such incident. You can configure such critical alerts and route them to any preferred notification channel (email, ITSM, webhook, runbook, and so on). Azure Backup integrates with multiple Azure services to meet different alerting and notification requirements:
Automatic Retry of Failed Backup JobsMany of the failure errors or the outage scenarios are transient in nature, and you can remediate by setting up the right Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) permissions3 or re-trigger the backup/restore job. As the solution to such failures is simple, that you don’t need tp invest time waiting for an engineer to manually trigger the job or to assign the relevant permission. Therefore, the smarter way to handle this scenario is to automate the retry of the failed jobs. This will highly minimize the time taken to recover from failures. You can achieve this by retrieving relevant backup data via Azure Resource Graph (ARG) and combine it with corrective PowerShell/CLI procedure. Watch the following video to learn how to re-trigger backup for all failed jobs (across vaults, subscriptions, tenants) using ARG and PowerShell. While transient errors can be corrected, some persistent errors might require in-depth analysis, and retriggering the jobs may not be the viable solution. You may have your own monitoring/ticketing mechanisms to ensure such failures are properly tracked and fixed. To handle such scenarios, you can choose to route the alerts to your preferred notification channel (email, ITSM, Webhook, runbook, and so on) by creating an Action Rule on the alert. Watch the following video to learn how to leverage Azure Monitor to configure various notification mechanisms for critical alerts. Read the following articles as starting points for using Azure Backup:
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