Welcome to the Era of Orchestrated Recovery Scenarios
Let’s set the scene. You’re sailing the high seas of cloud infrastructure, feeling pretty invincible—that is, until a rogue wave crashes over the bow, threatening to sink your digital ship. Maybe it’s a regional outage in Azure, a critical misconfiguration, or the ever-dreaded ransomware attack. Whatever the cause, one truth rings loud and clear: recovery speed isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential for survival.
Enter the game-changer: N2W Recovery Scenarios. In this post, you’ll learn how to set this up for your Azure cloud resources.
What Are Recovery Scenarios, and Why Should You Care?
Think of recovery scenarios as your data center’s “big red recovery button”—the one you push when things go sideways and you need your entire environment resurrected, stat. N2W’s Recovery Scenarios automate the recovery of multiple Azure resources—VMs, disks, the works—in a single click, based on pre-set policies. So when trouble hits, you’re not frantically piecing together your cloud like a digital Humpty Dumpty.
It’s not just about speed (although, hello, that’s pretty great). It’s about consistency, compliance, and, frankly, sleeping better at night.
How Does It Work? Your Guided Tour with a Solution Architect
Let’s step into the shoes of Cynthia Santos, Senior Solution Architect at N2W, who lays it all out:
- Dashboard Navigation:
From your N2W dashboard, simply head to the “Recovery Scenarios” tab. - Creating a New Scenario:
Click “New” → “Azure Recovery Scenarios,” and you’ll see all your backup policies. Pick the policy that covers the resources you care about. Give your scenario a name (like “DR Test”). - Choosing a Destination:
Here’s where the magic happens. Recover to your original location or, better yet, a designated DR (Disaster Recovery) region—say, from the East Coast to the wild, wild West (region). If you’re moving across regions, keep in mind: network settings will change, so double-check those configs! - Decide: Dry Run or Go Time?
Want to see if your backup is shipshape? Select “dry run”—this option checks if all the pieces are in place and sends you an email report. When it’s for real, choose “recovery” and watch as resources spring back to life in your DR region. - Notifications and Continuity (Because Who Likes Surprises?)
You can send reports to your email and set the scenario to soldier on even if one resource fails—because partial recovery is better than no recovery. - Fine-Tune the Recovery Order & Network Settings:
Pick the order your resources come back online (hint: prioritize your mission-critical VMs first) and preselect network interfaces for each resource. - Set and Forget (But Test Regularly):
Most folks run these recovery tests quarterly, archiving reports for compliance or insurance. When you actually need it, just hit “run scenario” and let automation take the wheel.
Why Set Up Azure Recovery Scenarios Now?
✅ Compliance evidence: Scheduled test reports are gold for audits.
✅ Insurance: If you never need it—fantastic. But if you do, you’ll want it ready.
✅ Speed: Forget manual fiddling in a crisis. Restore your whole environment with one click.
✅ Customization: Order of recovery, cross-region restoration, network reconfiguration—you do you.
As Cynthia wisely puts it, you hope you’ll never need large-scale recovery. But hope is not a strategy. With Azure Recovery Scenarios and N2W, you’re in full control: automate, customize, and report on recovery—so you never have to rebuild your world from scratch.
