2016 has definitely been the year of backup applications leveraging the cloud. In the start of last year we saw Veeam build a product called Cloud Connect which used it's backup software to replicate Virtual machines to another location. To spin this backup up into a useable environment for Always On or a Disaster recovery solution you then needed to utilize some third party hardware or convert the machines into AWS Machines. This could be done however it was not the easiest and went against what the cloud was for ... an always on scaleable solution! It did mean Small to Medium business; could start to have a cost effective Disaster Recovery site without the huge costs of replicating their whole onsite environment to another data center ( something only enterprise or large organisations could pay for)

Zerto a pretty new product on the scene enhanced this technology by reducing RPO's ( recovery point objective (time to copy backup files) to minutes instead of hours which means if a site when done lost work would greatly be reduced. Zerto also enabled replication from cross platform products for example replicate a Vmware environment to a Hyper V environment to  save on licensing costs for your DR Solution. It also in Version 4 allowed you to replicate VMware to AWS - http://www.zerto.com/products/enterprise/replication-backup-to-aws-amazon-web-services/. Zerto also has a minimum license of 25 virtual machines which is the high end of a medium size company in the UK.

The slight problem with Veeam V9 and below is you needed to host your own infrastructure to be able to host the repository. Now with Veeam 9.5  you can replicate this straight to Azure which means you only pay for the storage it uses until you turn the product one.

Released a year ago, Microsoft Azure Backup Server used Microsoft technology to backup Windows Machines using the Windows Agent directly to Azure. This was good however agents installs are not the best way to back things up now thanks to virtual environments. Now Microsoft Azure Backup Server is agent less which means it can backup your whole Virtual Center Server environment including Linux machines to Azure.