Chapter 2. Backup and Restore Improvements

We saw in the first chapter that the lines between on-premise and public cloud services have become blurred. The integration between on-premise and off-premise technologies imply that you can now easily implement a backup solution that makes use of both, thus allowing you to maintain up-to-date backups both on-site and off-site. This will allow you to implement a disaster recovery plan that meets strict service-level agreements without having to invest in a Disaster Recovery (DR) site. The DR site can be in the cloud. Depending on your environment, this can significantly reduce the cost of implementing a fully blown disaster recovery site or server room.

There are several new features in SQL Server 2014 that make this possible; they are as follows:

• Backup to URL

• Backup to Microsoft Azure

• Encryption

In this chapter, you will look at how you can make use of the new features and integrate them into your backup and recovery plans to ensure that you maintain...