Azure Backup Pricing Plans and Review
In today’s age of cyber threats, organizations are looking for various ways to backup data online. Taking a retrospective look at the past few years with incidents like ransomware, persistent data breach, cyber threats and malware attacks no longer being uncommon, organizations have realized the need to prevent major data disasters that can affect at every level- financially, reputational damage and productivity.
Microsoft Azure Backup provides a top of the line storage facility for businesses that are looking to store their data on the cloud. Data is stored in a highly secure environment by being replicated across various data centers spread across various geographical regions. Not only does this guarantee the protection of your data in the event of a hardware failure, but also natural calamities and disasters such as earthquakes, fire and floods. Azure creates a total of 3 copies in data centers located in the same region, and other redundant copies are stored onto foreign data centers located hundreds of miles away from your location.
All of the data — whether stored in storage objects, located on physical media, optical or magnetic disks, is fully encrypted. When the data is being transferred over the network (from server to client-end and vice versa), or across the service bus (from cloud to on-premises, and vice versa), it is encrypted in order to prevent unauthorized access to intruders.
Why Are So Many Businesses Moving to Azure Backup?
Azure provides a simplified and sophisticated one-click backup facility to protect your data from ransomware, hardware failure, human errors, viruses and malware.
Instead of setting up their own data centers and investing heavily in infrastructure, businesses and organizations prefer to acquire an Azure license. This helps improve data organization, monitor the flow of information, automate tasks, and recover data in the event of an unforeseen situation.
Data Protection With Cryptographic Key Vault
Businesses can make use of the Cryptographic Key Vault to manage keys and assign permissions. As an example, administrators use Master Keys to manage the encryption of their data, and Developers use separate Developer Keys intended for temporary production activities. When developers need to access more features, the administrator grants them additional permissions to those keys. Similarly, the administrators can revoke any or all permissions at any period of time. Another handy feature of the Cryptographic Key Vault is that it keeps a log of all the activities.
No Transfer Limit & Long-term Retention
Azure Backup does not enforce any data transfer limit. This means that you get unlimited inbound and outbound data transfer facility with no restriction of any kind. Also, you don’t have to switch from disk to tape and vice versa. Your data is stored in the vault as long as you need it.
Azure Isn’t Just About Cloud Backup
Microsoft Azure isn’t a single product. It offers a collection of a range of cloud-based services and toolkits that are used for a varying number of activities. Users can pick from a range of cloud services for storage, computing, networking and analytical purposes. All the products covered under your Azure subscription are primarily classified into different categories based on their key purposes.
Computing
Microsoft Azure allows users to connect to Virtual Machines located on the remote server. These provide seamless virtualization experience to businesses easy to use, secure on-demand and scalable resources. Azure also provides batch processing and remote access to your applications.
Development and Deployment
This includes a wide range of features that enable the development and deployment of Internet-based applications, Content Delivery Services (CDS), management of Application Program Interface (API), search, reporting, and much more.
Analytical Services
Azure provides various analytical services such as real-time analytics, machine learning, business intelligence, big data analysis, Internet of things (IoT), and so on.
Microsoft Azure services are spread across 140 countries. However, some of these services are region-specific due to compliance requirements.
Azure Backup Plans & Pricing
The subscription price of the Azure account is based on the number of services you subscribe to. Microsoft implements a flexible Pay As You Go model to charge organizations for only those services they opt for, and so they save money by not paying for all the services they do not use.
Microsoft Azure doesn’t charge any upfront cost for setting up and managing the account. You only pay for the exact amount of data that you want to backup and the storage resources you choose such as database, physical and virtual servers.
Storage Costs:
- First Tier: The price to store data on the cloud starts with as little as $0.024 per GB for the first TB per month.
- Second Tier: The next 49 TB costs you $0.0236 per GB every month.
- Third Tier: Azure charges you $0.0232 per month for the advanced tier of 50 TB to 500 TB storage.
- Fourth Tier: The fourth tier offering of 500 TB to 1000 TB costs you $0.0228 per GB every month.
- Fifth Tier: To avail 1000 TB to 5000 TB storage space, Azure charges $0.0224 per GB every month.
- To avail more than 5000 TB of storage, you’ll need to contact Microsoft for customized quotes.
Backup Costs:
An instance of 50 GB of backup size should cost you $5 for each instance. The next tier of 50 GB to 500 GB costs $10 for each instance.
Support Costs:
Microsoft offers backup availability, and support to customers at an additional payment of $29 that is charged every month.

Raza Ali Kazmi works as an editor and technology content writer at Sorcim Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. He loves to pen down articles on a wide array of technology related topics and has also been diligently testing software solutions on Windows & Mac platforms.