I am excited to announce the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). You can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice within a geographical cluster without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription. This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, allows you to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all your IaaS based applications running on Azure.

As you move production applications to the cloud, Azure natively provides you the high availability and reliability that your mission critical workloads need. However, compliance requirements such as ISO 27001 still require that you have a provable disaster recovery solution in place as part of a business continuity plan (BCP). The set of features that we are announcing today for Azure IaaS fill this important need.

Disaster Recovery for Azure IaaS applications extends ASR's existing functionality, and further simplifies the onboarding experience for customers:

Offered “as-a-Service” – You do not need any additional software infrastructure (VMs or appliances) in your Azure subscription to enable this functionality. You avoid all the complexity and cost associated with deploying, monitoring, patching and maintaining any DR infrastructure.

Simplified experience – Enabling cross-region DR for an application is so simple that all you need to do is select the VMs you want to protect, choose a target Azure region, select replication settings and you are good to go.

Application-aware recovery – Whether you are an application owner, disaster recovery admin or a managed service provider, ASR lets you stay in control at all times - you can decide when and how to orchestrate a failover. With support for best-in-class recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and ASR's powerful Recovery Plans, your applications can meet the recovery requirements that your business demands.

Non-disruptive DR drills – With ASR’s test failover capability, you can easily perform a DR drill anytime without any impact to the primary production workload or to ongoing replication, giving you the confidence that your DR solution will work when you need it.

Cross-region DR feature is now available in all Azure public regions where ASR is available. Click here to get started.