If you are a business that relies on an application or website that is hosted in the cloud to function, ensuring that these are available at all times is critical. While hosting on big platforms like AWS is commonplace, with the outage in October 2025 it has shown that most businesses, SaaS providers, web retailers and more are all unprepared for the eventuality that these services are unavailable and lose millions.

So, what can you do? The simple answer is a business continuity plan and the best way to do this would be a multi-cloud backup strategy. In this article we talk you through how backing up AWS hosted solutions in Azure can provide you with better business resiliency.

Why Multi-Cloud Backup is Your Best Uptime Insurance

A multi-cloud DR strategy provides an “air-gapped” resilience that a single cloud cannot match. By replicating your critical data and system images from AWS to Azure, you are protecting against the deepest levels of vendor-specific risk, including:

  • Regional Outages: A widespread outage in a single AWS region, while rare, can halt operations globally. Having a recoverable copy in a geographically disparate Azure region ensures a parallel recovery path.
  • Vendor-Specific Security Threats: While both clouds are secure, isolating your backup data in a different environment protects it from an attack or vulnerability unique to your primary cloud’s infrastructure or management plane.
  • Human Error and Malicious Activity: Accidental deletion or configuration mistakes in your AWS environment won’t immediately compromise your independent, air-gapped backups residing in Azure.

The ultimate benefit is a dramatically reduced Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Instead of relying solely on your primary vendor’s recovery processes after a major incident, you can initiate a failover and restore operation from your replicated environment in the Azure cloud, minimising service interruption and lost revenue.

The AWS to Azure Backup Blueprint

Executing a successful multi-cloud backup from AWS to Azure involves securing your application’s components and choosing the right replication method:

  1. Data and Storage: Critical data, such as database snapshots (e.g., from RDS) and object storage (from S3), must be replicated. For instance, data from AWS S3 can be transferred securely to Azure Blob Storage using dedicated tools or established services like AWS DataSync, which facilitates secure, fast data transfer between clouds.
  2. Application and Compute: For your website or application running on AWS EC2 instances, you’ll need to capture full machine images. Third-party multi-cloud data protection tools are often the most efficient way to manage this. They can take an EC2 image, convert it to a format compatible with Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), and store it in an Azure Recovery Services vault or as a managed disk snapshot.
  3. Network and Identity: A key to rapid recovery is ensuring that Azure is ready to host the application. This involves pre-configuring an equivalent Azure Virtual Network (VNet) and setting up identity and access management (IAM) roles that mirror your AWS permissions, ensuring a near-instantaneous switchover if disaster strikes.

Partnering for Seamless Multi-Cloud Success

While the native cloud tools provide the basic framework, the complexity of continuous data conversion, network mapping, and failover automation is significant. This is where a specialist cloud partner like Bridgeall adds crucial value.

We help you design and implement a backup and DR approach that meets your needs and budget. We offer a range of solutions and approaches to meet every scenario, from different regions, multi-cloud to hybrid cloud options. By leveraging Azure’s robust infrastructure as a recovery site for your AWS workloads, you secure the highest level of resilience and ensure your business never misses a beat, even in the face of the unexpected.

Don’t let your business continuity depend on a single provider. Embrace a multi-cloud backup strategy today to transform disaster recovery from a risk into a competitive advantage. Get in touch today to find out more.