Announcing agentless backup for Azure VMs in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud

In recent years, the adoption of public clouds has skyrocketed, with Microsoft Azure emerging as a leading platform for businesses worldwide. As organizations continue to migrate their workloads to Azure, ensuring the protection and reliability of these environments becomes increasingly critical. With the growing reliance on cloud infrastructure, managed service providers (MSPs) must have robust backup solutions to safeguard their clients' data in every environment.

While Azure is generally recognized as a secure cloud platform, it does not inherently protect against all data loss scenarios. User errors, accidental deletions, misconfigurations, malicious activities such as ransomware attacks, software bugs, and unexpected outages can all result in data loss. Furthermore, regulatory compliance often mandates specific data protection measures, making backups an essential component for your Azure infrastructure.

With the 24.05 release of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, we are excited to introduce agentless backup capabilities for Azure VMs. This innovative solution offers several significant advantages:

• Simplicity and ease of use: Acronis agentless backup eliminates the need to install and manage agents on each VM, streamlining deployment and reducing ongoing maintenance efforts, particularly in large environments.

• Reduced performance impact: By not requiring software to run on the VM, agentless backup minimizes the impact on VM performance, which is crucial for maintaining the efficiency of critical applications.

• Broad compatibility: The agentless approach is OS-independent, allowing backup of virtually any VM regardless of its operating system.

Agentless backup presents several advantages over traditional agent-based backup solutions. First, it eliminates performance issues caused by agents consuming system resources, which can impact VM performance during backup operations. This is especially problematic for resource-intensive applications or environments with strict performance requirements. Second, agentless backup reduces the complexity of maintenance, as it does not require the installation, regular updates, or troubleshooting of software agents on each VM. This leads to lower administrative overhead and a decreased likelihood of human error. Third, agentless backup offers better scalability by simplifying the process of managing backups across a growing number of VMs, without the need for additional agents.

Additionally, agentless backup avoids compatibility issues that may arise with different operating systems or VM configurations, ensuring reliable backups without disruptions. Finally, agentless backup reduces the attack surface by eliminating the additional points of vulnerability that agents introduce, enhancing overall security.

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is the first Azure backup solution to utilize Microsoft's newest Restore Points API. This API offers a highly efficient way of working with Azure VM snapshots, delivering several key benefits:

• Improved RTO: Achieve faster recovery times by utilizing recent snapshots stored in Azure, which eliminates the need to download data from backup storage.

• Reduced storage consumption: Incremental restore points store only changes since the last backup, significantly lowering Azure storage costs over time.

• Cost-effective storage for snapshots: Regardless of the VM disk type, restore points are stored on standard HDDs, which are more economical than premium disk types.

• Ultimate reliability: The Restore Points API ensures data consistency for multi-disk VMs by capturing point-in-time snapshots for all managed disks attached to a VM. This is crucial for complex applications like databases, ensuring a consistent state across the entire system during backup.

The following scenarios illustrate the value of agentless backup for Azure VMs:

1.       Seamless data mobility: Acronis Any-to-Any Recovery enables you to restore physical or virtual workloads to Azure and vice versa. All bootability issues of the underlying operating systems in migrated machines are taken care of by Acronis.

2.       Large-scale infrastructures: MSPs and enterprises managing a significant number of Azure VMs benefit from simplified management and reduced maintenance efforts.

3.       Hybrid / multicloud environments: MSPs and customers operating across hybrid or multi-cloud env ironments can leverage a unified backup solution without the need for separate agents.

4.       Performance-critical applications: Organizations running performance-sensitive applications can minimize the performance impact of backups.

5.       Scalable infrastructures: Businesses that need to rapidly scale their infrastructure can do so without the overhead of managing additional backup agents.

6.       Cost-conscious companies: Organizations looking to reduce Azure backup costs benefit from the storage efficiencies and reduced management overhead provided by agentless backup.

For detailed instructions on how to enable and use the new agentless backup functionality in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, please refer to the following resources:

• Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud Documentation
  

• Step-by-Step guide
  

• Demo video
  

Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue to innovate and provide the best data protection solutions for your Azure environments.