Disaster recovery strategy and back up

Question

Azure data factory has backup in the form of self-hosted IR as fail-over, and I believe for the ADF pipeline and its logic Git can be used as a backup. What are the comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plans for other resources such as the ADLS and key vault? Please advise.

Answer 1

What are the comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plans for ADLS?

ADLS is a critical component for storing and analyzing large datasets in Azure.

1. Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS): ADLS can be configured with Geo-Redundant Storage, which replicates your data to a secondary region. This provides a fallback option if there’s an outage in the primary region. The data is asynchronously replicated, ensuring that the secondary region can take over in case of a disaster.
2. Snapshots: Azure offers the capability to take snapshots of your ADLS files. These snapshots can serve as backups that you can revert to in case of accidental deletions or modifications. Snapshots are read-only and can be retained according to your backup policy.
3. Automated Backups: Implement automated backup scripts using Azure functions or logic apps that periodically copy critical data from ADLS to a different storage account or region. This can be set up to run on a schedule, ensuring that backups are consistent and up to date.
4. Data Replication Across Regions: Besides using GRS, you can set up custom replication processes to copy data across different regions or storage accounts. This provides an additional layer of redundancy and ensures that your data is available even if an entire region goes down.

How can you implement a disaster recovery strategy for Azure Key Vault?

Azure Key Vault is essential for managing secrets, keys, and certificates securely. Protecting this resource is crucial for the security and availability of your applications.

1. Geo-Redundancy: By default, Azure Key Vault is geo-redundant, meaning the data is replicated to a secondary region. This automatic replication ensures that your keys, secrets, and certificates are available even if the primary region fails.
2. Backup of Keys and Secrets: Azure Key Vault provides a built-in feature to back up keys and secrets. Regularly take backups of these items and store them securely, perhaps in another Key Vault in a different region or in a secure on-premises location. These backups can be restored in case of accidental deletion or corruption.
3. Access Policies and RBAC: Ensure that access policies and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) are in place to limit who can access and modify the Key Vault. Regularly audit these policies to ensure they are up to date and that only authorized personnel have access.
4. Soft Delete and Purge Protection: Enable Soft Delete and Purge Protection features in Azure Key Vault. Soft Delete allows you to recover a deleted key, secret, or certificate within a specified retention period, while Purge Protection ensures that even if a deletion is requested, the item is not permanently purged until the retention period expires. This is critical for accidental or malicious deletion scenarios.

What additional considerations should be made for disaster recovery in Azure environments?

1. Documentation and Runbooks: Ensure that your disaster recovery plan is well-documented and that runbooks are created for each critical resource. These documents should outline the steps needed to restore services, including any specific configurations or scripts required.
2. Testing and Drills: Regularly test your disaster recovery plan through simulations and drills. This helps identify potential gaps in the plan and ensures that your team is prepared to execute it effectively during an actual disaster.
3. Automation: Leverage Azure automation tools like Azure Site Recovery for failover processes and Azure Automation for tasks like backups and restores. Automation reduces the chances of human error during a disaster and speeds up recovery times.
4. Cross-Region Redundancy: For mission-critical applications, consider deploying resources across multiple Azure regions. This way, even if one region experiences an outage, your application can continue running in another region with minimal downtime.

Answer 2

Hello azure_learner

Please follow the below Microsoft official documents to have a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan for ADLS and Key Vault.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/general/backup?tabs=azure-cli https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/azure-storage/blobs/recovery/data-protection-backup-recovery

ADLS:

1. Data Protection and Redundancy: LRS, ZRS, GRS, RA-GRS
2. Soft Delete and Versioning

• Soft Delete: This feature allows you to recover blobs that have been accidentally deleted or overwritten, within a retention period you specify.
• Blob Versioning: Stores different versions of a blob, allowing you to restore any previous version.
• Point-in-Time Restore: Enables you to restore your storage account to a previous state at a specific point in time.

3. Backup:

• Azure Storage does not natively provide a point-in-time backup mechanism, but you can use tools like Azure Backup or third-party solutions to take snapshots and retain them according to your backup policy.

4. Disaster Recovery:

• In case of a regional failure, data stored in GRS or RA-GRS can be restored from the secondary region.
• Regularly test your disaster recovery plan to ensure data can be restored quickly and correctly in case of an outage.

Azure Key Vault:

1. Backup and Restore:

• Key Vault Backup: You can back up secrets, keys, and certificates in Key Vault to protect against accidental deletion. The backup is stored in your storage account.
• Restore: Backed-up data can be restored to the same or a different Key Vault within the same Azure subscription.

2. Soft Delete and Purge Protection:

• Soft Delete: When enabled, deleted secrets, keys, and certificates are retained for a configurable retention period, allowing you to recover them.
• Purge Protection: Prevents the permanent deletion of soft-deleted items until the retention period expires.

3. Disaster Recovery:

• For DR, you can restore Key Vault data to a new vault if the original vault is lost.
• Ensure regular backups and enable soft delete and purge protection to minimize the risk of data loss.

I hope this answers your question. Please let me know if you have any further questions.