I need to devise a backup solution for some Azure virtual machines, in a hybrid cloud scenario (persistent VPN, Active Directory DCs present in both the company LAN and the Azure virtual network, all machines domain joined); workloads include file servers, SQL Server databases and SharePoint sites.
The current backup solution for internal servers uses Data Protection Manager 2012, with both disk and tape protection, and a tape rotation schedule using weekly, monthly and yearly tapes.
The company management is adamant that the backups should not reside on the cloud only: physical tapes must exist and must be stored safely offsite; also, the tape rotation schedule should be kept as is.
However, these requirements pose some real problems when moving the servers to the cloud; specifically, it seems like they can only be met by having a local DPM server, which would perform backups of Azure virtual machines; but this would create truly obscene amounts of Internet traffic, and would also require the same amount of local disk storage we are currently using for backups (which we would instead like to free up).
Is there any solution to perform cloud-based backups of Azure virtual machines (using either a virtual DPM server or the native Azure backup agent, but it seems the latter is a lot less powerful than the full DPM product), while still being able to somewhat save those backups to physical tapes?