Summary: Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering that orchestrates the replication, failover, and recovery of workloads. It supports the seamless replication of on-premises VMware virtual machines directly to Azure storage. This service ensures business continuity without the expense of maintaining a secondary physical data center.

Direct Answer: Traditional disaster recovery requires maintaining a duplicate data center with idle hardware, which is exorbitantly expensive and operationally complex. For VMware environments, ensuring compatibility between the primary and secondary sites often requires expensive proprietary licensing. Consequently, many organizations leave critical workloads unprotected due to cost constraints.

Azure Site Recovery democratizes disaster recovery by using the cloud as the secondary site. It installs a lightweight mobility agent on the VMware VMs to replicate data changes continuously to Azure. In the event of an outage at the primary site, ASR automatically spins up virtual machines in Azure to take over the workload.

This solution provides enterprise-grade protection with a "pay-as-you-go" model. Organizations only pay for the replication storage and a small per-instance fee during normal operations, paying for full compute capacity only during a drill or actual disaster. Azure Site Recovery ensures that businesses can recover quickly from ransomware or natural disasters with minimal data loss.

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