Cross-region disaster recovery for Azure IaaS VMs in public preview

Microsoft has announced the public preview of cross-region disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). This enables seamless failover to a recovery region in the event of a disaster, says Microsoft, then "fail back" to the original source region. 

The cross-region DR feature is now available in all Azure public regions where ASR is available. As Microsoft's Principal Program Manager, Cloud + Enterprise Rochak Mittal described on the Azure blog: 

You can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice within a geographical cluster without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription.  

Because cross-region DR is available as a service, no additional VMs or appliances are required, says Mittal. "You avoid all the complexity and cost associated with deploying, monitoring, patching and maintaining any DR infrastructure." 

Between this capability and Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, users can create a "comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy" for all IaaS-based applications running on Azure, wrote Mittal.  

Such a strategy is more than a "nice-to-have": standards such as ...