What's new in Azure Backup

Azure Backup is constantly improving and releasing new features that enhance the protection of your data in Azure. These new features expand your data protection to new workload types, enhance security, and improve the availability of your backup data. They also add new management, monitoring, and automation capabilities.

Updates summary

Migration of Azure VM backups from Standard to Enhanced policy is now generally available

Azure Backup now supports migrating VM backups (protected with Standard policy) to the Enhanced policy, offering greater flexibility and resilience.

This feature includes:

  • Scheduling multiple backups per day (up to every 4 hours).
  • Retaining snapshots for extended durations.
  • Ensuring multi-disk crash consistency for VM backups.
  • Providing zonally resilient snapshot-tier recovery points.
  • Enabling seamless migration of VMs to Trusted Launch, and using Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disks for the VMs without disrupting existing backups.
  • Migrating protected VMs from Standard policy to Enhanced policy in bulk.

For more information, see Migrate Azure VM backups from Standard to Enhanced policy.

Vaulted Backups for Azure Database for PostgreSQL - flexible server is now generally available

Azure Backup now supports vaulted backup for PostgreSQL Flexible Server across all Azure regions, offering a robust and scalable backup solution designed to meet the resiliency and compliance needs of enterprises.

Key Features include:

  • Policy-based scheduled backups: Eliminates manual intervention and increases efficiency.
  • Long-term retention: Ensures long-term retention of backups upto 10 years for regulatory and compliance requirements.
  • Cyber resiliency: Protects from ransomware threats with immutability and role-based access control.

For more information, see Azure Backup for PostgreSQL Flexible Server overview.

Back up SAP ASE (Sybase) database is now generally available

Azure Backup now supports SAP ASE (Sybase) database backups on Azure VMs. Backups stream directly to managed Recovery Services vault of Azure Backup, ensuring security with Immutability, Soft Delete, and Customer Managed Key (CMK). Data is stored in a Azure-managed subscription, isolating it from user environments for enhanced protection.

With stream-based backup, log backups can occur every 15 minutes, enabling Point-In-Time recovery. Restore options include Alternate Location Restore, Original Location Restore, and Restore as Files.

Azure Backup also offers cost-effective policies (weekly full + daily differential) to reduce storage costs, alongside Multi-SID and Cross Subscription Restore (CSR) support.

For more information, see Back up SAP ASE (Sybase) database.

Migration of Azure VM backups from standard to enhanced policy (preview)

Azure Backup now supports migration to the enhanced policy for Azure VM backups using standard policy. The migration of VM backups to enhanced policy enables you to schedule multiple backups per day (up to every 4 hours), retain snapshots for longer duration, and use multi-disk crash consistency for Virtual Machine (VM) backups. Snapshot-tier recovery points (created using enhanced policy) are zonally resilient. The migration of VM backups to enhanced policy also allows you to migrate your VMs to Trusted Launch and use Premium SSD v2 and Ultra-disks for the VMs without disrupting the existing backups.

For more information, see Migrate Azure VM backups from standard to enhanced policy (preview).

Azure Files vaulted backup (preview)

Azure Backup now enables you to perform a vaulted backup of Azure Files to protect data from ransomware attacks or source data loss due to a malicious actor or rogue admin. You can define the schedule and retention of backups by using a backup policy. Azure Backup creates and manages the recovery points as per the schedule and retention defined in the backup policy.

By using vaulted backups, Azure Backup copies and stores data in the Recovery Services vault. This creates an offsite copy of data that you can retain for up to 99 years. If any data loss occurs on the source account, you can trigger a restore operation to an alternate account and access your data. Additionally, you can use Backup center to manage the vaulted backups at scale and monitor the backup operations by using the rich Alerting and Reporting capabilities of Azure Backup.

If you're currently using snapshot-based backups, we recommend that you try vaulted backups (preview) for complete protection from different data loss scenarios.

Note

Switching to vaulted backups (preview) doesn't lead to loss of the existing snapshots, and they're retained as per the expiry date set in the current backup policy. All future backups will be transferred to the vault as per the schedule and retention set in the modified policy.

For more information, see Azure Files backup overview.

Next steps

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