In modern day and age we deal with so many applications daily. And I’m sure you would have experienced atleast an outage once. Imagine how catastrophic it would be if outages were common, we couldn’t rely that our data would be safe with the organizations or our work would be uninterrupted.

Even a few seconds outage can cause the organizations billions. This is where disaster recovery comes in, it helps us ensure our users don’t face any interruption and can access their applications/servers seamlessly. Azure Site Recovery is a DR solution offered by Microsoft.

Contrary to this Azure Migrate is a tool used solely for cloud/Azure migration. This isn’t designed for DR because it doesn’t provide a failback option. In this article I talk about these two options and try to point out major differences between the both.

Table of contents:

Azure Site Recovery

As mentioned earlier Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides organizations the opportunity to utilize Azure as their secondary site to help protect workloads in case of disaster. Instead of purchasing and setting up a secondary data center a lot of organizations are utilizing Azure as their secondary or disaster recovery data center and ASR is helping them to do that, by replicating the required workloads into Azure.

Azure Site Recovery can be used to configure continuous replication of your servers to Azure. And you can spin up your Azure Virtual machine with a single click in case of any disaster on primary region/datacenter.

Azure Site Recovery provides an option to failback to the primary datacenter if you wish to run your servers on your on-premises datacenter. This option would synchronize all your recent changes to the primary datacenter and start the replication again from on-premises to Azure.

Azure Migrate

As the name suggests Azure Migrate is the tool that helps you migrate your virtual machines, or physical servers from your own data center into Azure.  The tool allows you to migrate after you have done an environment assessment, or even without an assessment. The Server Migration tool allows them to transfer that workload in Azure in a controlled and reliable way. Please note Azure Migrate can’t be considered a backup, or a disaster recovery tool. It is designed to perform only migrations.

Unlike Azure Site Recovery, Azure Migrate doesn’t have a failback option, and you can only migrate to Azure once the sync is complete.

Conclusion

For a long time the advice from Microsoft was to utilize ASR to help migrate your workloads from your own data center to Azure, and it can still be used for that scenario however there is a now a new tool on the block and migrations is it’s sole purpose.

You should use Azure Migrate if you are planning to migrate your workloads to Azure. But if you want a DR solution, that allows you to use a secondary data center to host your servers in case of any disaster in the primary location, you should go for Azure Site Recovery.

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