Microsoft has launched a couple of new features for its Azure Site Recovery and Backup services.

First up is Azure Site Recovery, which has been given the ability to enable “protection and disaster recovery” for physical servers and VMware virtual machines. It allows businesses to remotely monitor the health of their machines and create tailor-made recover plans in the event of any disasters.

Should something go wrong, Site Recovery ensures you can smoothly failback to your on-premise infrastructure to keep things up and running. Microsoft adds that customers can also use Site Recovery as a means to test new versions of their applications, before using the failback center to move them into production.

These features are a direct challenge to VMware, which performs the same task with its vCloud Air offering via a single controller from the cloud. Microsoft is obviously trying to muscle in on its turf.

The second item is Azure Backup, which is now available as a preview. Using Azure Backup, businesses can ensure they SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, Windows clients and Hyper-V virtual machines applications are always backed up. For now, Microsoft says the focus is on providing backup services for its on-premises hardware, but it’s also making a preview of the service for data that resides in customer’s existing data centers.

Microsoft is clearly aiming both services at large enterprises, and says they should be especially appealing to those who wish to shift to hybrid cloud deployments.

In one final piece of news out of Redmond, Microsoft said its Azure API Management Premium service is now out of preview. The service has been officially launched with a couple of new features to the Azure Active Directory, including per-app multifactor authentication and password rollover.