Safeguarding Critical Data for Business Resilience
In today’s always-on business environment, downtime isn’t just disruptive—it’s costly. Whether it’s caused by cyberattacks, natural disasters, or infrastructure failures, any interruption in service can severely impact operations, reputation, and revenue. That’s why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) planning is essential, especially for organisations with business-critical applications and data.
Azure NetApp Files (ANF) offers a powerful and flexible platform for managing file-based workloads in Azure with high performance and low latency. Backed by enterprise-grade features, ANF is purpose-built to help organisations meet stringent availability, compliance, and recovery requirements.
In this post, we’ll explore how Azure NetApp Files supports robust BCDR strategies using built-in capabilities like Snapshots, Snapshot Policies, Backup Vault, and Cross-Region/Zone Replication. Additionally, in the event of a cyber-attack, Customer Managed Keys (CMK), encryption at rest, which can protect against data exfiltration.
What is Azure NetApp Files?
First, let’s remind ourselves what is Azure NetApp Files (ANF). ANF is a Microsoft first-party, Azure native service that delivers high-performance, low-latency file storage. It supports industry-standard protocols (NFS, SMB & Dual-protocol), integrates directly with the Azure Resource Management API, and is ideal for use cases susch as SAP HANA, HPC, Virtual Desktops, Azure VMware Solution & Databases.
Unlike other Azure storage services, ANF provides a seamless blend of performance, scalability, and manageability—without the need to refactor applications. Most importantly, it comes with a rich feature set tailored for business continuity and disaster recovery.
Key BCDR Features in Azure NetApp Files
Snapshots and Snapshot Policies
Snapshots in ANF are point-in-time, read-only virtual copies of a volume. They are instantly created and do not impact performance or require downtime, making them ideal for frequent recovery points.
With Snapshot Policies, you can automate the creation and retention of snapshots at intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, monthy) that align with your RPO (Recovery Point Objective) requirements. In case of data corruption, accidental deletion or worst case, ransomware attacks, you can instantly revert to a previous snapshot without a lengthy restore processes.
Benefits:
- Near-instant recovery
- No impact on application performance
- Automated policy based retention
Azure NetApp Files Backup Vault
The Azure NetApp Files Backup Vault provides long-term data protection by enabling incremental backups of ANF volumes. These backups are stored separately from the original data. It’s particularly useful for compliance and regulatory requirements, offering:
- Off-load Backups into Backup Vault
- Manual and policy based backups
- Daily, Weekly & Monthly backups
Backup Vault adds another layer of protection by allowing full volume restoration even in cases of complete volume loss or regional failure.
Volume Replication
To ensure business continuity even in the event of a regional or zonal outage, ANF supports:
- Cross-Region Replication (CRR): Asynchronously replicates data to a different Azure region, ensuring redundancy across geographically separated locations.
- Cross-Zone Replication (CZR): Asynchronously replicates data to a different Azure availability zone, ensuring redundancy across separated datacenters in region.
- Cross-Zone-Region Replication (CZRR): Asynchronously replicates data to two protection volumes. This can be in any combination of cross-region and cross-zone from the same source volume. This feature is currently in Public Preview.
These replication capabilities support both high availability and disaster recovery use cases:
- Failover between paired & non-paired regions
- Efficient block based replication
- Geographical data distribution
Fortifying Data Security with Azure NetApp Files Customer-Managed Keys
In an era where cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated, organisations must adopt proactive strategies to safeguard sensitive data. Azure NetApp Files (ANF) offers a powerful defence mechanism through the use of customer-managed keys (CMKs) for volume encryption—an essential feature for mitigating the risk of data exfiltration during a cyber attack.
Unlike platform-managed keys, CMKs empower customers to retain full control over the encryption lifecycle. This includes the ability to rotate, revoke, and audit key usage independently of the service provider. In the event of a breach, this autonomy becomes critical: if an attacker compromises the infrastructure but not the key vault, the encrypted data remains inaccessible and unusable.
The security benefits of CMKs are particularly pronounced in cross-tenant scenarios. For example, in SaaS or ISV-hosted environments, the NetApp account may reside in one Azure tenant while the encryption keys are stored in a separate, customer-controlled tenant. This separation of duties ensures that even if the service provider’s environment is compromised, the attacker cannot decrypt the data without access to the customer’s key vault.(Public Preview)
Moreover, ANF supports seamless integration with Azure Key Vault and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), enabling secure authentication and key access via managed identities. This design ensures that encryption operations are tightly governed and auditable, without introducing performance overhead.
From a compliance perspective, CMKs help organisations meet stringent regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. By demonstrating that encryption keys are customer-controlled and isolated from the service provider, businesses can strengthen their security posture and reduce audit risk.
In summary, Azure NetApp Files with customer-managed keys offers a robust, layered defence against data exfiltration. It combines technical resilience with operational control, giving organisations the confidence to run critical workloads in the cloud—even in the face of evolving cyber threats.
Use Case: BCDR for a Crucial SAP Deployment
Consider an enterprise running SAP HANA on Azure. Downtime or data loss could lead to significant operational disruptions. Example using ANF:
- Snapshots are taken every hour with a 7-day retention policy
- Backups are stored in the ANF Backup Vault weekly for compliance
- Data is replicated across regions, ensuring rapid failover in case of disaster
- Data is encrypted at rest using the customer own keys (CMK)
The result is a resilient, automated BCDR framework—fully integrated with the Azure ecosystem and without sacrificing performance.
Summary
Azure NetApp Files is more than just a storage solution—it’s a strategic asset for business continuity. With capabilities like Snapshots, Snapshot Policies, Backup Vault, and Cross-Region/Zone Replication, organisations can build resilient architectures that safeguard business-critical workloads and meet even the strictest BCDR requirements.
If your business depends on fast, reliable, and secure access to data, Azure NetApp Files provides the tools to recover quickly, reduce risk, and maintain operational continuity-even under the most demanding conditions.
For updates on the Azure NetApp Files service, check out the What’s new in Azure NetApp Files page.
For more information, visit the official Azure NetApp Files page.