Overview
This article provides an overview of the cloud-native, agentless solution designed to protect your critical data stored in Azure Blobs. By creating decoupled, air-gapped backups in the secure Cloud, this architecture provides robust protection against ransomware and other vulnerabilities. This enhances visibility into your storage accounts and offers granular control, allowing you to protect data at the storage account or container level. This simple, cost-effective solution significantly reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through advanced deduplication and by eliminating egress costs for customers.
Components of Azure Blob Storage and its Access Tiers
To effectively manage and protect your data, it's essential to understand the components of Azure Blob storage.
Blob Types
Azure offers different types of Blobs, each optimized for specific use cases:
Block Blob: Ideal for storing text and binary data files. Block Blobs are composed of individual blocks of data that can be managed separately and can store up to 190.7 TiB. Currently, we support backup and restore for Block Blobs only.
Append Blob: Also made up of blocks, this type is optimized for append operations, making it perfect for logging scenarios, such as recording data from virtual machines.
Page Blob: Used for storing random access files up to 8 TiB in size. Page Blobs serve as the underlying virtual hard drives (VHD) for Azure virtual machines.
For more information, refer Introduction to Azure Blob Storage.
Key Features for Azure Blob Protection
Air-gapped Ransomware Protection
Immutable, Air-gapped Backups: Safeguard your data from ransomware by creating immutable backups in its secure, air-gapped cloud environment, isolating them from potential attacks.
Cloud-Native Agentless Architecture: The solution is entirely cloud-native and agentless, meaning no compute resources are running in the customer's environment, which reduces operational burdens.
End-to-End Encryption: Data is protected with encryption both at rest and in transit.
Flexible, Granular Backup and Restore
Granular Backup Control: Protect Azure Blobs at multiple levels, including entire storage accounts or specific containers. Backups can be targeted using Blob Index Tags, ensuring your protection strategy aligns with your organizational needs. You can also protect your container and Blob metadata.
Versatile Restore Options: Flexible restoration capabilities to meet diverse recovery scenarios. You can restore Blobs to a new container by specifying the container in the same or a different Azure subscription, or storage account.
Intelligent and Efficient Restores: When restoring at the container level, the existing container is compared with the recovery point and only the differential Blobs are restored. You also have the option to restore Blobs to their original container, replacing the original objects.
Ransomware Security: Utilizes zero-trust security principles and data isolation to protect against ransomware.
Disaster Recovery: Offers cross-region recovery capabilities and options to orchestrate failover.
Flexible Restores: Restore point-in-time backups, individual files, or entire images.