Developers concerned about protecting the applications they have deployed on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform have new options to choose from today. The company announced a new preview of its Azure Backup service, along with new features for its Azure Site Recovery service.
The new features are tailored to help companies that are using hybrid cloud deployments take advantage of cloud storage to back up their on-premise assets. The features will allow businesses to back up files and folders in the cloud, including SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, Windows client, and Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) applications. Microsoft also added a preview of support for backing up Windows and Linux Infrastructure as a Service virtual machines in Azure Backup.
Companies can also use Azure Site Recovery to have on-premise servers take over running an application in the event the company’s primary data center fails.
Azure Active Directory also got an update today, with a preview of support for password roll-over that will allow companies to give access to a social media account through Azure without revealing the username and password to employees. Today’s update also brings multi-factor authentication per application, which allows administrators to require employees to use multi-factor authentication with some apps that require high security, but keep lower-security apps open for use without a multi-factor rigamarole.
It has been a big day for cloud news. Google also announced a new Cloud Deploy feature for its Cloud Platform that allows developers to deploy open source packages without a lot of work.
