When creating a recovery plan for an Azure virtual machine, what is the primary feature to include for data protection?

When developing a recovery plan for an Azure virtual machine, incorporating regular backups with Azure Site Recovery is fundamental for ensuring robust data protection. Azure Site Recovery provides a comprehensive disaster recovery solution that allows for continuous replication of virtual machines, enabling you to maintain data availability and minimize downtime. This is especially crucial in scenarios where data integrity and availability are paramount, as it allows you to restore services quickly to a previous state in the event of a failure or data corruption.

Regular backups ensure that you have up-to-date recovery points to revert to, facilitating quick restoration. This aspect is vital, as it addresses not only data loss but also plays a significant role in meeting compliance and business continuity requirements. By focusing on the backup capabilities of Azure Site Recovery, you create a solid foundation for your disaster recovery strategy, ensuring that critical data can be recovered swiftly and reliably following an incident.

The other options may enhance data protection but do not provide the comprehensive solution that regular backups with Azure Site Recovery offer. For instance, point-in-time snapshots can be useful, but they do not provide ongoing protection and management like a robust backup solution. Redundant storage accounts may enhance availability but do not directly facilitate recovery processes. Automated alerts for outages are beneficial for monitoring but do not contribute directly to data