Immutable Backups inside Microsoft Azure Backups, explained to a manager

Question

I have a manager who's interested in immutable backups within Microsoft Azure. Based on the information I am gathering so far the recovery service vault does not offer this feature, but Microsoft Azure BLOB storage does. My boss wants me to explain how immutable backups work within Microsoft Azure which I get the gist of time based retention policies and legal hold policies which are created within the storage under containers, but he will ask questions as to why Azure backups does not have this feature? He will want to know what process is in place that replaces immutable backups within Microsoft Azure backups and how it works. If there is any way you can point me to documentation that can help explain it to him I would greatly appreciate it.

Answer 1

@Brian Erickson Just to add to the previous answer. Here is a feature that Azure Backup provides that is close to being immutable:

Soft delete for Azure Backup

Concerns about security issues, like malware, ransomware, and intrusion, are increasing. These security issues can be costly, in terms of both money and data. To guard against such attacks, Azure Backup now provides security features to help protect backup data even after deletion.

One such feature is soft delete. With soft delete, even if a malicious actor deletes a backup (or backup data is accidentally deleted), the backup data is retained for 14 additional days, allowing the recovery of that backup item with no data loss. The additional 14 days of retention for backup data in the "soft delete" state don't incur any cost to you.

Soft delete protection is available for these services:

Soft delete for Azure virtual machines
Soft delete for SQL server in Azure VM and soft delete for SAP HANA in Azure VM workloads

Hope this helps you. Please let us know if you have any further questions and we will be glad to assist you further. Thank you!

Remember:

Please accept an answer if correct. Original posters help the community find answers faster by identifying the correct answer. Here is how.

Want a reminder to come back and check responses? Here is how to subscribe to a notification.

Answer 2

Azure backup now supports immutable vaults fir both Recovery Services Vault and Backup Vault. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-immutable-vault-concept?tabs=recovery-services-vault