Windows Azure Online Backup and Cloud Protection

Windows Azure Online Backup is a cloud-based backup solution enabling server data to be backed up and recovered from the cloud in order to help protect against loss and corruption; current trial offers 300GB of free storage for the next 6 months.

Windows Azure Online Backup now supports cloud-based backup from on-premises System Center 2012 SP1 via the Data Protection Manager component.

Key features
Below are some of the key features being delivered in Windows Azure Online Backup:

• Simple configuration and management.
  • Simple, familiar user interface to configure and monitor backups from Windows Server and System Center SP1.
  • Integrated recovery experience to transparently recover files, folders and VMs from the cloud.
  • Windows PowerShell command-line interface scripting capability.
• Block level incremental backups.
  • Automatic incremental backups track file and block level changes, only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization.
  • Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changed blocks between these versions.
• Data compression, encryption and throttling.
  • Data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to Windows Azure over the network. As a result, Windows Azure Online Backup only places encrypted data in the cloud storage.
  • The encryption passphrase is not available in Windows Azure, and as a result data is never decrypted in the service.
  • Users can setup throttling and configure how Windows Azure Online Backup utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information.
• Data integrity verified in the cloud.
  • Backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is complete. As a result, any corruptions due to data transfer are automatically identified and repair is attempted in the next backup.
• Configurable retention policies.
  • Retention policies Configure and implement retention policies to help meet business policies and manage backup costs.

More information can be found here and here;
Nice article here on setting up Windows Azure Online Backup with DPM 2012 SP1;