Business continuity keeps critical outcomes running through disruption. Disaster recovery restores them after serious failure. Recovery time objective is the target time to restore service; recovery point objective is the acceptable data-loss window. Azure Backup protects supported data/workloads, while Site Recovery replicates and orchestrates supported machines for failover.
Begin with a business impact analysis:
Not every component needs the same RTO/RPO. Match cost to impact.
Azure Backup supports specific Azure and hybrid workloads through Recovery Services vaults or Backup vaults depending on source. Configure policy frequency/retention, vault redundancy/immutability, soft delete, encryption, identity, network, and monitoring. Use Azure Policy to detect unprotected supported resources.
For an Azure VM lab, review retention and vault redundancy before enabling protection. The vault and protected VM must use a currently supported location combination.
Ways to build
Choose the Azure tool you want to use. The underlying resource stays the same.
Search Backup center → + Backup. Select Azure Virtual Machine, choose or create the Recovery Services vault, review the policy frequency/retention and estimated storage, select the test VM, and enable backup. Trigger an on-demand backup, watch the job, then schedule an isolated restore test; a successful job alone does not prove application recovery.
Site Recovery replicates supported VMs/workloads between configured source and target, with recovery plans and test failover. It does not automatically make every dependency available. Plan target networks, IP/DNS, identity, certificates, load balancers, databases, capacity/quota, and security controls.
Run test failover into an isolated network. Clean it up after validation. Planned and unplanned failover have different data-loss and coordination expectations.
Use each service's native capabilities: zone redundancy, geo-replication, failover groups, secondary regions, backups, point-in-time restore, or rebuildable projections. For example, an AI Search index should usually be rebuildable from governed source data; a database needs transactional recovery; a model deployment needs quota/capacity in the recovery region.
Active-active requires conflict, consistency, session, traffic, deployment, and dependency design. Two active frontends sharing a single-region database are not region-resilient.
Automate repeatable steps, but retain human gates for irreversible data failover.
Run table-top exercises, component restores, isolated regional failover, loss-of-identity/network scenarios, and full business-journey tests. Measure actual RTO/RPO, data consistency, manual decisions, and missing access. Track remediation to closure.
Declare vaults, policies, protected items where supported, secondary region network/platform, diagnostics, alerts, and runbook automation. Separate backup administration from workload administration, enable protective features, and monitor deletion/disable operations.