Resiliency and Recovery with Azure Backup and Site Recovery (Microsoft Ignite 2025)

Microsoft Ignite Session ID: BRK146

November 21, 2025

Rochak Mittal, Partner Product Manager, Microsoft

Rohan Sahini, Product Manager, Microsoft

Learn how to protect, detect, and rapidly recover your most critical workloads—across Azure VMs, databases, file shares, and cloud native applications like AKS. Modernize backups with secure by default protection and immutable storage, use intelligent signals, and orchestrate clean, at scale restores. We’ll cover threat aware backups, container aware protection, and one click DR to help you recover with confidence while meeting your RPO/RTO goals and compliance needs.

TL;DR Summary

  • Resiliency focus: Microsoft is unifying resiliency tools (Backup, Site Recovery, Chaos Studio, Observability, Advisor) into a single Resiliency Portal.
    Three pillars of resiliency:
    • Infra resiliency → High availability, zonal resiliency, validation drills.
    • Data resiliency → Azure Backup & Site Recovery for short-term restores, compliance retention, VM & database protection.
    • Cyber recovery → Defenses against ransomware/attacks with air-gapped vaults, immutability, multi-user authorization, and Defender for Cloud integration.
  • Continuous journey: Resiliency isn’t one-time; requires ongoing monitoring, drift detection, and validation.
  • Resiliency agent: New tool to simplify and automate resiliency deployment at scale.
  • Workload coverage:
    • IaaS → VM + SQL/SAP HANA backups with RPO as low as 15 minutes.
    • PaaS / Cloud-native → Kubernetes + managed databases (Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL) with integrated protection.
  • Cyber recovery demo: Defender for Cloud scans restore points for malware before recovery, ensuring clean backups.
  • Key takeaway: Azure now offers a one-stop resiliency hub for infra, data, and cyber recovery, making protection and restoration faster, more secure, and easier to manage.

Chapters:

0:00 – Focus shift to data resiliency and cyber recovery with Azure Backup and Defender integration

00:07:00 – Deep dive begins into data resiliency and cyber recovery for diverse workloads

00:07:57 – Introduction to Infrastructure Service Workload Scenario

00:08:10 – Overview of Two-Tier Application Architecture (Frontend VM and Backend Database)

00:10:52 – Demo Introduction: Two-Tier Application Backup Process

00:16:51 – Importance of Backing Up Containers and Stateless Resources

00:19:16 – Demo Part 1: Kubernetes Cluster Backup via Azure Resiliency

00:22:44 – Cyber Recovery for Unstructured Data and Unified Protection Summary

00:28:42 – Replication Capabilities, RPO, SLA, and Throughput Enhancements