Protection refers to maintaining your applications and data available, even with outages that are ahead of your control. Protection in Azure is provided by two services. Azure Backup provides backup and recovery of your data, either in the cloud or on-premises. Azure Site Recovery offers business continuity and immediate recovery during a disaster.

Azure Backup service

The Azure Backup service offers simple, secure, and cost-effective solutions to back up your data and recover it from the Microsoft Azure cloud.

What can I back up?

On-premises – Back up files, folders, system state using the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent. Or use the DPM or Azure Backup Server (MABS) agent to protect on-premises VMs (Hyper-V and VMware) and other on-premises workloads

Azure VMs – Back up entire Windows/Linux VMs (using backup extensions) or back up files, folders, and system state using the MARS agent.

Azure Managed Disks – Back up Azure Managed Disks

Azure Files shares – Back up Azure File shares to a storage account

SQL Server in Azure VMs – Back up SQL Server databases running on Azure VMs

SAP HANA databases in Azure VMs – Backup SAP HANA databases running on Azure VMs

Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers – Back up Azure PostgreSQL databases and retain the backups for up to 10 years

Azure Blobs – Overview of operational backup for Azure Blobs