As an IT Pro, you know the importance of having a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place. However, budget constraints can make it difficult to implement a full DR solution. One way to prepare for a disaster is to create an offsite copy of your source data or environment, and a great way to do that is taking advantage of the Skytap API to create a backup of your Skytap on Azure Environment as a Template, then copy that Template backup to another region for DR.
Together Skytap’s API and Azure Runbooks offer a simplified approach to DR. You can save templates of your environments (referred to as “live copy”) in one region (the source region) and create a copy in another region (the target region). I have provided an example PowerShell script on GitHub and you can check out this quick how-to guide in the Skytap Well-Architected Framework that demonstrates how to create a template from a live environment and then create a copy in another region using the Skytap API. 
There are many ways to schedule and automate this process, such as using a Windows task scheduler or an Azure runbook. However, with an Azure runbook, you can schedule and apply various options that might better suit your specific DR plan. Additionally, you can also include tasks such as deleting the previous day’s copy for more granular control.
Please note that Skytap’s template backup and copy-to-region functions are available to all Skytap customers at no additional cost. If you would like a demo or more information, please contact us.
Skytap team members that contributed to this blog:
Lagath Gunasinghe – Cloud Solutions Architect at Skytap
Randy Courtwright – Cloud Solutions Architect at Skytap
Matthew Romero – Technical Product Marketing Manager at Skytap
