Microsoft Azure is updating its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with some few important updates. The company's cloud computing service is about to receive a new data protection capabilities and along with some important features.

New Data Protection Feature Launched

According to eWeek, which got the full details of the story, the Redmond-based software company is about to give Azure Cloud platform a new data protection capabilities along with an expanded set of new storage management features which aimed at bigger workloads.

Azure Backup isn't the only cloud storage-related update Microsoft has released this week. Microsoft is also introducing a new instant file recovery feature for Azure Backup that will enable the service to pull double duty as a restore-as-a-service solution. The company called Instant Restore.

As mentioned in the Microsoft's blog post, with Instant Restore, users can now restore files and folders instantly from cloud-based recovery points without provisioning any additional infrastructure, and at no additional cost.

The new data protection feature will also provide a writeable snapshot of a recovery point that the users can quickly mount as one or more iSCSI based recovery volumes. Additionally, the new data protection feature can be used to unify file and folder recovery operations from the cloud or on-premises sources and works with both Azure virtual machines and local machine.

In addition to the file and folder recovery operations, the Azure Backup Instant Recovery feature will also allow Microsoft customers to validate backups and preview application files without completely restoring them.

Azure customers can also use the new feature to restore multiple files from various folders to a network share or local server, according to Microsoft.

Azure Backup Instant Recovery And Feature Availability

The Azure Backup Instant Recovery is currently available in preview for Microsoft customers using the Azure Backup agent and Azure VM backup with Windows VMs. Microsoft has made a walk-through available online to provide more information about the new Azure File Recovery feature.

In other Microsoft Azure news, the software company has just announced that its Managed Disks service for Azure VMs, which said to help bridge the PaaS and IaaS gap for the cloud customers, has finally entered general availability.