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Afi Backup for Microsoft Azure

Afi SaaS backup for Azure provides comprehensive protection for Azure virtual machines, including configuration and disk data.

Afi adopts multi-tenant organizational and access model tailored to enterprise use-cases, complete with comprehensive audit for user and system activities as well as extensive monitoring capabilities. To offer granular access configuration as well as backup and data management features, Afi leverages native Azure resource group hierarchy, providing convenient group-based mass-management for service operators and protected resource groups.

Afi provides backup for both virtual machine configuration and data as well as recovery to a new virtual machine with the same or custom configuration. Backup is based on the Azure restore point technology, ensuring crash consistency for multi-disk configurations as well as application consistency for certain Windows and Linux applications:

  • Application consistency is guaranteed for Windows applications implementing a VSS writer.
  • For Linux applications, application consistency can be achieved using pre-/post- scripts.

During a virtual machine backup, Afi create a restore point for the virtual machine and then synchronizes the corresponding snapshot data to the Afi cloud. Restore points are kept on the Azure side for 7 days to allow fast recovery from recent backup snapshots.

Afi offers a unique feature set for navigating and accessing backup data, simplifying date-to-day backup management for large and constantly evolving production infrastructures, including:

  • Detailed configuration preview for a virtual machine backup, including its disks, network interfaces, and public IP addresses;
  • Ability to download virtual machine configuration in Azure-native JSON format;
  • Volume contents browse for supported volume configurations;
  • Ability to download selected files from inside a volume locally;
  • Ability to view virtual machine configuration changes history;
  • Global search across all or a selected set of backups in a tenant that allows to easily locate a virtual machine backup by various properties (ID, name, tag, location, resource group, etc.);
  • Annotation labels highlighting virtual machine configuration changes.

As a SaaS backup solution, Afi takes a proactive approach to service reliability and resiliency by implementing continuous monitoring of service health and activities (e.g., backups, restores). Any issues detected by Afi’s monitoring system are proactively investigated and resolved, in most cases even before they are noticed or reported by account administrators. Afi is resilient to Microsoft API errors and temporary throttling spikes, relieving account administrators of the need to constantly monitor the service or investigate transient backup issues. Additionally, Afi offers 24/7 technical support to address all requests, from technical configuration and product questions to service issue reports.