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Azure Site Recovery
Your servers run in one data centre or one region. Their recovery shouldn’t depend on building another — Azure Site Recovery replicates your servers into an Azure region or zone — in India if you choose — and fails them over in order, with drills that never touch production.
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How it’s rated
Full scoreboard ↓Quick answer
The Microsoft platform family
This page covers Azure Site Recovery — failover of Azure VMs and on-premises servers into Azure. The rest:
Quick facts
30-second orientation- Product
- Replication and failover of servers into Azure
- Maker
- Microsoft, as a native Azure service
- Sources
- Azure VMs, VMware, Hyper-V, physical and AWS Windows servers
- Target
- Azure only — another region, or another zone in the same region
- Recovery points
- Crash-consistent every 5 minutes; kept up to 15 days
- RTO SLA
- One hour per protected instance; no RPO SLA exists
- Price
- $25 per protected instance a month; first 31 days free
- Analysts
- Not in Gartner’s 2025 or 2026 backup Magic Quadrant
- India
- Central, South, West India and India South Central (Hyderabad)
- In India via
- TechBag — sizing, Azure estimate, INR/GST and support
Understand cloud-target DR before you buy it
Most product pages skip this. We start here — so you buy a capability, not a buzzword.
What is cloud-target DR?
Cloud-target DR keeps a live replica of your servers in a cloud region and starts them there when the primary site, zone or region is lost.
A second data centre and a yearly runbook vs Azure Site Recovery — the honest table
What consolidation actually replaces, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | A second data centre, a yearly runbook | Azure Site Recovery |
|---|---|---|
| The DR site | A second data centre with idle hardware | An Azure region or zone, paid for on failover |
| Keeping it current | Nightly copies and manual rebuild notes | Continuous replication, points every 5 minutes |
| The runbook | A document someone updates once a year | Recovery plans with groups, scripts and runbooks |
| Proving it works | A weekend outage, if anyone agrees to it | Test failover in an isolated network, any day |
| The recovery-time promise | Whatever the team can manage on the night | A one-hour RTO SLA per protected instance |
| What it is NOT | — | Not backup, and not DR to a site outside Azure |
The cheapest test uses the 31 free days: replicate one application tier, run a test failover into an isolated network, and time it.
The five pieces of the platform
Vendors love diagrams; buyers need to know what they’re actually operating. Here’s the whole platform, demystified.
Vault
Replication, recovery plans and failover are run from a vault. Only orchestration metadata reaches it, kept in the vault’s geography; the replicated data does not pass through.
Source
For Azure VMs an extension captures disk writes and stages them in a cache storage account in the source region; VMware and physical servers use the modernized replication appliance.
Target
Each source disk gets a managed replica disk in the target region or zone, with recovery-point snapshots beside it; no VM runs there, or bills compute, until you fail over.
Plans
Up to 100 protected instances per plan, grouped to start in order, with scripts, manual-action pauses and Azure Automation runbooks between the groups.
Continuous replication into replica disks in an Azure region or zone — a vault and recovery plans that start them in order.
Nine capabilities. Replicate, recover, prove.
Azure Site Recovery turns an Azure region into your disaster-recovery site, with no second data centre to build.
Any two Azure regions
Azure VMs replicate between any two regions, can be kept within one geography, and can cross subscriptions inside one Entra tenant.
A second zone, same region
VMs fail over to another availability zone without data leaving the region; in India only Central India is listed for it today.
VMware, Hyper-V, physical
On-premises servers replicate into Azure; VMware uses the modernized appliance and supports vSphere 6.5 to 9.0.
Failover in a set order
Plans of up to 100 instances start group by group, pausing for manual steps or running scripts and Automation runbooks.
Pick the recovery point
Fail over to the latest point, the latest processed one for a faster start, the latest app-consistent one, or a custom point.
Reprotect and come home
After failover, reprotect replicates back so you can fail over again to the source; a physical server returns only as a VMware VM.
Drills beside production
A test failover starts VMs in an isolated network you choose with no effect on replication; cleanup deletes them afterwards.
Azure Monitor alerts
Built-in Azure Monitor alerts and reports watch replication health; the classic ASR alerts retire on 23 September 2027.
A one-hour RTO SLA
Microsoft credits 100% of the fee if a protected instance takes over an hour to fail over — unless target capacity was short.
Watch Azure Site Recovery in action
What Site Recovery does, the modernized VMware path, monitoring with Azure Monitor alerts, and the console now called Resiliency in Azure. All from Microsoft’s official Azure channel.
Overview of Azure Site Recovery
What the service does, for Azure VMs and for servers in your own data centre.
Protect your VMware VMs using modernized Azure Site Recovery
The modernized appliance — the only VMware path since the classic one retired in March 2026.
Monitoring Azure Site Recovery with alerting and reporting
Azure Monitor alerts and reports for replication health and failover jobs.
What is Azure Business Continuity Center?
The console Microsoft has since renamed Resiliency in Azure; its features carry on.
Want a live, India-context walkthrough for your environment?
Book a guided demo →Most DR plans are a binder and a building nobody tests. Site Recovery makes an Azure region the second site, and drills it.
Here’s what genuinely sets it apart — and exactly where it stops.
A second site without building one
The DR site is an Azure region you already have access to. Servers in your own data centre, or VMs in another region or zone, replicate continuously as managed replica disks, and nothing runs or bills compute until you fail over. In India the target can be Central or South India, so the replicas stay in the country.
A failover you can rehearse
Recovery plans start up to 100 instances group by group, with scripts, manual pauses and Automation runbooks between groups. A test failover runs the whole plan in an isolated network while replication carries on, so the runbook gets timed before a disaster rather than written during one.
A published meter and a written SLA
The licence is a list price: $25 per protected instance a month, free for each instance’s first 31 days, the same in the Indian regions. Microsoft’s SLA puts the recovery time objective at one hour per instance with a full credit if it is missed — rare among DR tools, most of which publish no RTO commitment at all.
Where it stops
Azure is the only target: site-to-site DR between your own data centres was retired in 2020 and 2023. It is not backup, since recovery points last 15 days at most. The SLA credit lapses if the target region lacks capacity, there is no RPO SLA, and replica disks, transfer and failover compute are billed on top of the $25 per instance.
The numbers behind the platform
What your Azure Site Recovery rollout looks like
List servers and targets
Inventory each VM or server, its disks, daily churn and source, then choose the Indian target region or zone for each tier.
Price the whole estate
Add replica disks, snapshots, cache storage, transfer and test compute to the $25 per instance, using Microsoft’s calculator.
Replicate a pilot tier
Create the vault, enable replication for one application tier and let initial sync finish before judging recovery points.
Run a test failover
Build a recovery plan, fail it over into an isolated network, and time DNS, logins and app checks against your target RTO.
Extend and schedule drills
Protect the remaining tiers before the 31 free days lapse, wire in Azure Monitor alerts and book a drill each quarter.
The review scoreboard
Modelled on Gartner Peer Insights structure. *Counts and breakdowns are illustrative pending verified review collection.
Quick poll — what’s driving your evaluation?
Talk to an advisor“We dropped the plan for a second data centre in Chennai. Our Pune servers now replicate to Central India Azure instead.”
“The first test failover took ninety minutes, mostly DNS. After two drills the recovery plan runs in under half that.”
“The $25 line was the easy part. Replica disks and snapshots for large SQL servers doubled what finance first expected.”
“Zone-to-zone in Central India covers a zone outage for our app tier; region loss still needs the South India pair.”
“Moving our VMware hosts off the classic configuration server before March was a project of its own, but the new appliance is cleaner.”
“Auditors asked for our backup retention, and we had to explain that fifteen days of failover points is not a backup policy.”
Where everyone sits — the grids
Analyst firms bury this view behind paywalls, and G2 retired its Grid. So here’s TechBag’s synthesis of the disaster recovery market — tap any vendor to see why it sits where it does.
TechBag Disaster Recovery Grid
Execution strength vs product vision — the classic market map, minus the paywall.
$25 per protected instance a month after 31 free days; storage and compute extra.
Target Choice × Recovery-Point Depth
The grid nobody publishes — how many places you can fail over to vs how fine and how long the recovery-point history runs.
Azure regions or zones only; points every 5 minutes, kept 15 days.
Positions are TechBag’s illustrative synthesis of public review-platform data and vendor documentation — not a reproduction of any analyst graphic. Verify before relying on it.
Azure Site Recovery vs the disaster-recovery field
Against AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Datto Backup for Azure, Veeam Data Platform, Commvault Cloud DR and HPE Zerto — on sources, targets, recovery points, recovery time, price, limits, security and India.
| Dimension | Azure Site Recovery | AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery | Datto Backup for Azure | Veeam Data Platform | Commvault Cloud DR | HPE Zerto |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Native Azure DR | Native AWS DR | Azure backup with DR | Self-run replication | DR inside a platform | CDP-first DR software |
| Sources protected | Azure, on-prem, AWS | On-prem and any cloud | Azure VMs and Files | Hypervisors, physical | VMs, physical, cloud | VMs and clouds |
| Recovery targets | Azure only | AWS only | Azure or Datto Cloud | Your own DR site | Site or four clouds | Site or many clouds |
| Recovery points | Every 5 min, 15 days | Seconds, up to 365 days | Hourly backups | CDP in seconds | Minutes, periodic | Seconds, 30-day journal |
| Recovery-time promise | 1-hour RTO SLA | Minutes, a claim | None published | Yours to deliver | Set by contract | 5 minutes, a claim |
| Pricing model | Per instance, monthly | Per server, hourly | Flat fee via an MSP | Per workload, VUL | Quote: VM or TB | Per protected VM |
| Published entry price | $25/instance/month | $0.028/server/hour | Not published | Reported, not listed | Not published | No public price |
| Billed on top | Storage and compute | EBS and EC2 | DR and tests included | The DR site itself | Target infrastructure | Target and journal |
| Scale limits | 64 disks, 32 TiB each | 300 to 3,000 servers | 1 TB per VM, per-VM | Grows with your proxies | Petabyte-scale platform | Journal sets the size |
| Orchestration and tests | Plans, test failover | Recovery plans, drills | Daily boot check | Orchestrator (Premium) | Recovery groups | VPGs, sandbox tests |
| Security depth | HTTPS, Private Link | TLS 1.2, EBS encryption | Off-tenant, immutable | Hardened repositories | Isolated Air Gap copy | Encryption detection |
| India storage region | Four Indian regions | Mumbai and Hyderabad | No Indian region | Wherever your site is | Your site or region | Your site or region |
| Support and exit | Azure plan; easy exit | Business plan advised | 24/7, 30-day exit | Portable licences | Commvault or partner | HPE support |
| Best fit | Azure-bound estates | AWS-bound estates | MSP-run Azure VMs | Veeam shops, own site | Multi-cloud enterprises | Near-zero data loss |
Which approach fits you?
Honest fit signals — because the fastest way to lose your trust is to pretend one product wins every scenario.
Choose Azure Site Recovery if…
- ✓Your servers already run in Azure, or should fail over into an Azure region in India rather than a second data centre
- ✓You want a published per-instance price and an RTO written into an SLA
- ✓Recovery plans and isolated test failovers matter more to you than a long recovery-point history
Compare alternatives if…
- ✓You need to fail over to your own second site or another cloud — Veeam, Commvault and Zerto all can
- ✓You want seconds of data loss and weeks of history — Zerto keeps a 30-day journal, AWS up to 365 days
- ✓Your estate is standardising on AWS — Elastic Disaster Recovery is the native equivalent there
Do not expect…
- ✓Backup — recovery points last 15 days at most, so pair it with Azure Backup
- ✓A price in rupees on Microsoft’s list, or the $25 per instance to cover storage and failover compute
- ✓Any SLA credit when the target region has no capacity left for your VMs
Azure Site Recovery is one of 27 disaster recovery products TechBag carries. The Disaster Recovery guide narrows them to a shortlist and shows the reasoning. →
What does hand-run disaster recovery cost you?
Drag the sliders (servers and VMs protected; engineer-hour cost). Estimates model engineering time spent keeping DR runbooks current, rebuilding servers by hand and running failover drills, at an assumed 1.5 hours per protected server a year, with 70% of it removed by recovery plans and isolated test failovers. Both figures are assumptions. Illustrative.
Loaded cost = salary + overheads per productive hour. Illustrative only — your TechBag quote models your actual environment and modules.
Three ways to consume it
Published: Microsoft lists Azure Site Recovery at $25 per protected instance a month when the target is Azure — region to region, zone to zone or from your data centre — with each instance free for its first 31 days. The same $25 per instance applies in the Indian regions; Microsoft publishes no rupee list, so it is about ₹2,400 at today’s exchange rate. The licence excludes replica disks, snapshots, cache storage, inter-region transfer, failover and test compute, Capacity Reservations and recovered software licences. TechBag prices the whole estate first, then bills in INR with GST.
Azure Site Recovery
Best for Azure-bound estates
- $25 per protected instance a month
- First 31 days free per instance
- One-hour RTO SLA per instance
+ Platform add-ons
Best for a broader rollout
- Scoped to your estate
- Add-on modules as needed
- Phased, right-sized deployment
What sits on top
Budget these before you commit
- Replica disks, snapshots, cache storage
- Transfer, $0.08/GB from Central India
- Failover and test-failover compute
Buy it for less — TechBag pricing beats list
Whatever the list prices above, TechBag negotiates a significantly better deal — with GST-compliant INR invoicing and local support. Ask us for your discounted quote.
Get an India-ready quote
Tell us your requirements and current tools — we’ll model it against what you spend today.
The 8 questions to ask every vendor
Take this into your next vendor call — including ours.
Which Indian region or zone is each tier’s target? Zone-to-zone is listed only for Central India, and West India needs an access request.
Is any source in India South Central? Azure-to-Azure vaults cannot be created there, so the vault must sit in another region.
Do any servers write more than 54 MB/s? That is the standard per-VM limit; High Churn reaches 500 MB/s only in eligible setups.
What do replica disks, snapshots, cache storage and $0.08/GB transfer add to the $25 per protected instance?
Will the target region have VM sizes free on the day? The RTO credit lapses without capacity; Capacity Reservations are bought apart.
Which backup holds data beyond 15 days? Site Recovery is not backup, so Azure Backup or another tool must cover longer history.
How do physical servers come home? They fail back only as VMware VMs, so plan the return trip before you need it.
Will Site Recovery be billed through a CSP in INR with GST, or on a direct Azure agreement in US dollars?
Questions buyers ask
Ready to evaluate Azure Site Recovery?
List your servers, their churn and the Indian region each should fail into, or let a TechBag advisor price the full estate and run a first test failover with you.
Stats, ratings, review counts and pricing are illustrative and sourced from public materials; verify before purchase.