A critical aspect of any ISV’s cloud usage is ensuring that they maintain a strong level of cost efficiency. Azure Backup can contribute to keeping backup costs low. Recently, Azure Backup have introduced a number of features which will allow ISVs to have more visibility into backup usage while also helping you take action in order to achieve cost savings.
They have outlined five steps you can take to optimize your backup costs, without needing to compromise on the safety of your data.
If you are backing up resources that have been deleted, it is recommended that you verify if you would like backups for the resources. Deleting unnecessary backups save on backup costs.
You can use the Optimize tab in the Azure Backup Reports solution to view all inactive resources across all types of workloads. This also allows for further investigation into inactive resources. If you discover that the resource doesn’t exist anymore, you can choose to stop protection and delete backup data for that resource.
If you backup SQL or SAP HANA databases inside Azure Virtual Machines, using daily differential backups along with weekly full backups is often more cost-effective than daily full backups.
You can also identify databases that are currently configured for daily full backup. You can choose to navigate to a particular backup item and modify the policy to use daily differential backup with weekly full backup.
It is also important to check if shorter retention duration for your backup item while still meeting your compliance requirements is possible. While this decision will depend on the specific needs of your organisation, Azure Backup can help ISVs gain easier visibility into items that have a large retention duration.
Often, ISVs may only require protection for certain disks within a machine as opposed to the entire machine. The Azure Virtual Machine backup solution requires you to protect the entire virtual machine. But now, you can choose to exclude or include certain data disks in the virtual machine (VM) from being protected to help save on backup costs.
For example, if you only want to backup the OS disk of your VM, you can exclude all other disks from being backed up, and achieve considerable cost savings.
Moreover, using PowerShell or Azure command-line interface (Azure CLI), you can also modify the protection to exclude or include specific data disks for a virtual machine that is currently being protected by Azure Backup. This way, you can reduce the backup cost for currently protected virtual machines too, without stopping backup or fear of losing the past recovery points.
When you configure backup for resources, geo-redundant storage (GRS) replication is applied bty default. While this is the recommended storage replication option as it creates more redundancy for your critical data, you can choose to protect items using locally-redundant storage (LRS) if that meets your backup availability needs for dev-test workloads. Using LRS instead of GRS halves the cost of your backup storage.
Clearly establishing your backup objectives and paying only for the backups you need can help ISVs free up funds. At the same time, Azure can continue to help keep data safe and recoverable.
Spanish Point Technologies has worked with many ISVs to help them harness the power of Azure for their applications.
Our development teams have migrated numerous ISV applications to Azure and have a deep understanding of Azure and its complimentary features and technologies. We can share years of experience in Azure development with CTOs, helping them define their cloud goals.
An efficient way to define your Azure migration strategy is SMART AIM.
Talk to our team to start defining your strategy.
