It started innocently enough. Just a few Azure VMs that needed backing up. “I’ll handle this manually,” thought Jack, a seasoned IT administrator. “It’s only a few systems. How hard could it be?” Famous last words that would lead him down a path of increasingly complex scripts, sleepless nights, and eventually, a spectacular recovery failure that nearly cost him his job.
This is the story of Azure backup dependency, hitting rock bottom, and finding recovery through automation. If you recognize yourself in this tale, know there’s a better way.
The Honeymoon Phase: Just Azure and Me
When Jack’s team first migrated to Azure, everything seemed manageable. Their infrastructure was modest—a dozen or so VMs running core applications. He set up a basic backup schedule using Azure Backup, and felt like he had things under control.
Each morning started with manually checking backup jobs, creating occasional on-demand backups before major changes, and running quarterly recovery tests. The Azure Portal became his second home, and he knew all its corners.
But even in these early days, Jack started noticing limitations. Even with Azure Backup’s Enhanced Policy (in preview), the most frequent backup schedule available was every 4 hours. “No problem,” he thought, “that’s good enough.” But was it really? For their transaction-heavy systems, even four hours of data loss would mean significant business impact.
And the restore tests? While Azure Backup does offer a File Recovery feature that allows mounting a recovery point to browse and recover files without a full VM restore, the process still felt cumbersome during high-pressure situations. During one particularly stressful incident, it took nearly four hours to locate and recover a critical configuration file using the mount-and-browse approach.
💡 While Azure Backup’s Enhanced Policy offers recovery points every 4 hours at best, N2W provides backup intervals as frequent as every five minutes. This dramatically reduces your potential data loss in a disaster scenario. Plus, N2WS’s File-Level Recovery offers a streamlined browse-and-download experience that many find more intuitive than mounting recovery points.
Growing Pains: Enter AWS and Chaos Ensues
Just as Jack was getting comfortable with the Azure backup routine, leadership dropped a bombshell: they were adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Several critical workloads would now run in AWS.
“We need the same level of protection for everything,” his boss insisted. Suddenly, Jack had to figure out AWS backup on top of existing Azure processes. Different interfaces, different terminology, different limitations.
He tried to maintain the same manual approach, but it was like juggling while riding a unicycle. Mornings were spent checking Azure backups and afternoons dealing with AWS. To make matters worse, some applications now spanned both clouds, with databases in one and application servers in another.
Jack’s quick fix? More scripts. He cobbled together PowerShell and AWS CLI commands that would report backup statuses. He built a dashboard that pulled data from both clouds. He even attempted to harmonize the backup schedules between environments.
But every script seemed to introduce new edge cases he hadn’t anticipated:
- What happens when a backup spans midnight in one region but not another?
- How to handle retention policies that differ between clouds?
- What about resources that get created dynamically?
The scripts grew more complex, more brittle. Hours were spent debugging why something failed to back up, only to discover an API had slightly changed or a permission was missing.
💡 With N2W’s unified console, you can manage all your AWS and Azure backup policies in one place, with consistent terminology and workflows. No more juggling different interfaces or writing complex scripts to bridge gaps between clouds.
Rock Bottom: The Weekend From Hell
It was a quiet Friday afternoon when one of the developers deleted a production database… accidentally, of course. No problem, Jack thought, they have backups!
Except the database was part of their cross-cloud architecture. The database was in Azure, but its configuration and schema definition were maintained in an AWS CodeCommit repository. And to complicate matters, the connection strings and security settings were stored in Azure Key Vault.
Jack started the restore process, confident he could have things running before anyone noticed. The Azure database restore seemed to work, but something was wrong. The application couldn’t connect.
As he dug deeper, he realized he needed the exact connection string configuration from the time of the backup. But the backup of the AWS repository was from a different time than the Azure database backup. The versions were incompatible.
Hour after hour slipped by as Jack tried to piece together the correct versions of every component. The CEO started texting, asking why their main customer portal was still down. By Sunday night, Jack had barely slept, the system was still offline, and he was questioning his career choices.
They eventually recovered by Monday morning, but the damage was done. Customer complaints, lost revenue, and worst of all, lost trust in their systems. In the post-mortem meeting, all eyes were on Jack and his “manual process with scripts” approach.
💡 Key Insight: Multi-cloud environments exponentially increase recovery complexity. Without proper orchestration, you can end up with mismatched components that can’t work together, even if each piece is successfully restored. N2WS’s Recovery Scenarios lets you define entire recovery sequences that ensure all interdependent components across clouds are restored consistently.
The Intervention: A Different Approach
After that disastrous weekend, one of Jack’s colleagues pulled him aside. “You can’t keep doing it this way,” she said. “There’s a better solution.”
She showed him her environment, where she was using N2W to manage backups across both AWS and Azure. Instead of juggling different interfaces and scripting everything, she had a single console that handled both clouds.
What caught Jack’s attention immediately were the Recovery Scenarios. She could define exactly which components needed to be recovered together, in what order, with what settings. The system automatically handled the orchestration, ensuring everything was consistent.
“And the best part?” she added. “It can back up as frequently as every five minutes if you need it to. No more ‘we can lose up to four hours of data’ conversations with the business.”
Jack was skeptical at first. He’d invested so much time in his scripts and processes. But she convinced him to try it out on a test environment.
Recovery: Building a Better Way
Jack started small, setting up N2W to back up a few test systems in both Azure and AWS. The difference was immediately obvious:
- One console for everything: He could see all backup status information in one place, with consistent terminology and workflows regardless of which cloud the resources lived in.
- Streamlined file recovery: When he needed to restore a single file, he could browse through the backed-up filesystem and just download what was needed—a more intuitive experience than Azure’s mount-and-browse approach and certainly much less painful than AWS recent search and item-level recovery capability.
- Frequent backups: He could set backup intervals as low as five minutes for their most critical systems, drastically reducing their potential data loss window compared to Azure’s 4-hour minimum.
- Real-time alerts: Jack received immediate notifications when something went wrong, rather than discovering failed backups the next morning.
- Immutable backups: He could enable compliance-mode immutability for critical backups, ensuring they couldn’t be altered or deleted, even by administrators—a crucial protection against ransomware attacks.
- Cross-cloud protection: Jack could create true air-gap security by copying backups between AWS and Azure, providing additional protection against cloud-specific outages or security breaches.
But the real game-changer was the Recovery Scenarios. Jack could define grouped resources—across clouds—that needed to be recovered together, specify the order of operations, and even automate post-recovery validation tests.
For their cross-cloud applications, he created scenarios that ensured the database, application servers, and configuration would all be restored from the same point in time, maintaining consistency. He could even run regular drills without impacting production.
The reporting capabilities also saved him from creating more custom scripts. Instead of cobbling together status information, he had comprehensive backup reports that could be shared with auditors and leadership.
Within a month, Jack had migrated their entire backup strategy to the new system. The scripts that had been consuming so much of his time were gone, replaced by a system that was more reliable and required far less maintenance.
💡 Best Practice: Create recovery scenarios that group all interdependent components together, even if they span different clouds or regions. Test these scenarios regularly through automated drills to ensure they work as expected. N2WS’s Recovery Scenarios can be scheduled and run automatically, generating reports for your audit and compliance needs.
Life in Recovery: The New Normal
It’s been six months since Jack completed the transition, and the difference is night and day:
- His mornings no longer start with anxious checking of backup statuses across multiple dashboards.
- When someone needs a file recovered, he can have it for them in minutes, not hours, using true File-Level Recovery.
- Their last disaster recovery test was completed successfully in under an hour, with full documentation automatically generated.
- Jack has stopped having nightmares about incompatible restore points.
- He sleeps soundly knowing that their critical data is protected with immutable backups, making them resilient against ransomware attacks.
- He’s even implemented Resource Control to automatically shut down non-critical systems during off-hours, generating significant cost savings, similar to how Gett was able to save more than $2,000 per instance, per month.
Most importantly, he’s reclaimed time to work on projects that actually move their business forward, rather than just keeping it safe. The cost savings from decommissioning complex script infrastructure and reducing recovery time has more than paid for the new solution.
If you recognize yourself in Jack’s story—if you’re currently juggling manual processes across multiple clouds, building increasingly complex scripts to hold it all together, and living in fear of the next recovery disaster—know that there’s a better way.
Learn from Jack’s mistakes. Don’t wait for a catastrophic failure to force your hand. The multi-cloud world is complex enough without trying to manage it all manually.
⚡️ Download our Cross-Cloud Essentials Guide (and checklist)
