how does azure Offsite backups, Business continuity failovers or replications work

Hello Nick Bossing,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum!

Azure provides robust solutions for offsite backups, business continuity failovers, and replication through services like Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Offsite backups:

Azure Backup supports offline backup, which transfers initial backup data offline, without the use of network bandwidth. It provides a mechanism to copy backup data onto physical storage devices. The devices are then shipped to a nearby Azure datacenter and uploaded onto a Recovery Services vault. This process ensures robust transfer of backup data without using any network bandwidth.

Please refer the link: Overview of offline backup - Azure Backup | Microsoft Learn

Business continuity failovers or Replication:

business continuity plans should include automated failover procedures within or between availability zones. This type of failover forms part of your high availability strategy. For example, if the active replica of a database fails, an automated process can promote a passive replica to become the active replica. Then, the web servers communicate with the new active replica. Similarly, if an availability zone fails, many solutions are built to automatically recover by using the remaining zones.

 Please refer the link: Failover and failback | Microsoft Learn

The Azure Site Recovery service contributes to your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy by keeping your business applications online during planned and unplanned outages. Site Recovery manages and orchestrates disaster recovery of on-premises machines and Azure virtual machines (VM), including replication, failover, and recovery.

Please refer the link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-quickstart

To understand where your data is physically stored in Azure especially in the context of offsite backups, failovers, and replication, Microsoft provides detailed documentation on how data redundancy works across regions and datacenters. 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-quickstart

Please let me know if you need further assistance on this.

Thanks.