Azure Site Recovery
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions
Data recovery software
Phone data recovery software
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- Ease of management
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$16 per instance per month
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What is Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a cloud-based disaster recovery service that orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of workloads to support business continuity. It is used by IT and infrastructure teams to protect on-premises servers and virtual machines, as well as workloads running in Azure. The service integrates with Azure networking and monitoring and supports planned and unplanned failover testing and execution. It focuses on workload availability and recovery orchestration rather than end-user device or phone data recovery.
Orchestrated failover and testing
Azure Site Recovery provides runbooks and recovery plans to coordinate multi-tier application failover and failback. It supports non-disruptive disaster recovery drills to validate recovery procedures without impacting production. It also offers planned failover for maintenance scenarios and unplanned failover for outages. These capabilities align with DRaaS use cases where repeatable recovery processes matter as much as replication.
Broad workload replication options
The service supports replication for common virtualization and server scenarios, including VMware and Hyper-V environments and physical servers (via agents) to Azure. It also supports Azure-to-Azure disaster recovery for workloads already hosted in Azure. This flexibility helps organizations standardize DR across mixed environments. It reduces the need to maintain separate DR tooling for each platform type.
Native Azure integration
Azure Site Recovery integrates with Azure networking, identity, and resource management to automate recovery into Azure subscriptions and virtual networks. It works with Azure Monitor and related logging to support operational visibility during replication and failover events. The service also aligns with Azure governance constructs such as resource groups and role-based access control. This can simplify operations for organizations already standardized on Azure.
Not a backup replacement
Azure Site Recovery is primarily designed for disaster recovery orchestration and near-real-time replication, not long-term retention or granular file-level restore workflows. Organizations typically still need a separate backup product for point-in-time recovery, compliance retention, and ransomware-resilient backup patterns. This distinction can be misunderstood when comparing it to backup-and-recovery suites. As a result, total data protection architecture may require multiple Azure services or third-party tools.
Azure dependency and cost complexity
Recovery requires Azure resources (compute, storage, networking) that can introduce variable costs depending on replication, storage consumption, and failover testing frequency. Pricing and capacity planning can be complex, especially when modeling large estates and different recovery time objectives. The service also increases dependency on Azure for DR execution, which may not fit organizations seeking a cloud-agnostic DR target. Network egress and regional considerations can further affect cost and feasibility.
Limited fit for phone recovery
Despite being listed under phone data recovery software, Azure Site Recovery does not target mobile device data extraction or recovery from smartphones. It protects server and VM workloads and does not provide tooling for recovering deleted phone files, device images, or app-level mobile backups. Organizations needing end-user device recovery typically require separate endpoint backup or mobile device management-integrated solutions. This makes it a poor match for consumer-style or forensic phone recovery requirements.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Site Recovery — to customer-owned sites | $16 per instance/month | Protect on-premises VMs/servers to a customer-owned secondary site. First 31 days free for each protected instance; storage, storage transactions and outbound data transfer (egress) are billed separately. |
| Azure Site Recovery — to Azure (A2A) | $25 per instance/month | Replicate on-premises VMs/servers directly into Azure (or cross-region in Azure). First 31 days free for each protected instance; replica storage, snapshots, storage transactions, egress and test/failover compute are billed separately. |
Seller details
Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, Washington, United States
1975
Public
https://www.microsoft.com/
https://x.com/Microsoft
https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/
