Computer Security and Compliance

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Server Backup/Recovery
ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a managed subscription service intended to provide small and middle-size organizations a reliable and affordable solution for backing up and restoring Hyper-V and VMware-powered virtual machines. ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be used with on-premises, offsite, multi-location, and hybrid cloud network models and also supports cost-effective cloud backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account.

Top features of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are advanced Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut storage size, Continuous Data Protection with backup intervals as low as five minutes for reducing your vulnerability to data loss, military-grade data encryption, flexible recovery alternatives for entire VMs or for individual files, full support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and VMware, and the ability to leverage Volume Shadow Copy Service technology to protect live VMs with no downtime.

Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a wide assortment of services to assist you to plan, implement, test and debug a data protection solution based on Altaro's VM Backup platform. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) Altaro VM Backup as a subscription service to provide remote management of your data protection ecosystem. Progent's certified Hyper-V experts and VMware vCenter and vSphere integration experts can help your organization to design and manage VM deployments that use on-premises or remote virtual machines or that work in a hybrid network that incorporates both on-prem and cloud resources. In addition, Progent offers workplace recovery planning consulting to help businesses to get ready for calamities such as ransomware assaults and widespread disasters.

Key Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to fulfill the data protection needs of most small and midsize organizations and provides ease of management plus a rich range of capabilities typically available only in enterprise-grade platforms. Altaro protects widely used releases of Windows Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and works with standard backup hardware:

Altaro VM Backup comes with powerful features in critical facets of backup such as backup replication, fast restoration, and management and reporting.

Backup and Replication
Altaro VM Backup delivers rapid, economical, and safe backup for data protection and archiving plus remote data replication for dependable recovery. Major backup and replication capabilities include:

• Ransomware Defense via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutable backup for cloud object storage allows tamper-proof data for a set duration so that backup data cannot be modified or deleted by any user including administrators. Immutable storage adds another level of security and restoration ability in case of a successful ransomware attack.
• Augmented In-Line Deduplication: In-line deduplication sends only changed data to backup storage devices, conserving bandwidth, cutting storage requirements, and improving throughput. Altaro's deduplication applies to data on single virtual machines and on multiple virtual machines.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Rather than performing daily backups, you can schedule backup intervals to as brief as five minutes to lower your RPO.
• Concurrent Backups: You can back up many VMs at the same time, which makes it possible to conduct backup processes during shorter low-activity time windows when more bandwidth is available and workload performance is less urgent.
• Live Backup: Altaro's integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) allows you to back up VMs without going offline.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to back up VMs within a Windows Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without CSV) or in a VMware vCenter environment supports large-scale implementations.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can set up the Altaro Offsite Server tool on an external server for storing a copy of your backups at a remote site.
• Flexible Scheduling and Retention Policies: You can set different backup schedules and retention policies for individual VMs.
  
  Scheduling and retention options for Altaro are simple to set up, review and revise

• Workload Consistent Backups: Altaro VM Backup can use Volume Shadow Copy Service and any VSS Writers working inside the target virtual machine when executing a backup. Apps including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL will sense the backup has taken place and automatically proceed with the relevant maintenance tasks like truncating transaction logs.
• Military-Class Encryption: Prior to copying your data to a backup destination, you have the option of encrypting it with the AES-256 standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You have the ability to select which Virtual Disks to include or ignore in your virtual machine backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS): Besides your continuous and daily backups, you can set up a special schedule to create and archive a new backup version each week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro VM Backup allows backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob storage account, which is the lowest priced storage alternative available on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro VM Backup permits you to protect VMs hosted on-premises, offsite or in the cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup allows seamless backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi clouds. No extra resources operating in the cloud are required to support backup storage.
• Back up to multiple offsite locations: For better resilience, you can make copies of VMs on multiple off-premises locations including multiple public clouds like Azure and Amazon S3.

• Restore as Clone: You can recover a virtual machine backup to a new destination with a new name, allowing the cloned virtual machine to operate alongside the original virtual machine. This eliminates the necessity to overwrite active VMs.
• Recover to Different Host: You can recover a virtual machine backup to a new or different Hypervisor. The VM can be recovered from the on-prem backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You may not cross-restore between Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can instantly boot any VM copy directly from the backup location either for verification or to achieve a significant reduction in Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Recovery: You can quickly recover specific files and folders from any virtual machine copy.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can create continuous copies of your VMs to a remote site and transfer instantly to the copy site in the event that a disaster disables your main VMs. This can significantly improve your Recovery Time Objective and put your organization back online fast.
• Exchange Item-Level Recovery: You can recover specific emails from the Exchange Mailbox.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup enables you to recover specific emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Recover Various Backup Versions: You can recover from multiple points in time rather than being limited to the last backup.
• Sandbox Restores and Testing: This feature lets you program or launch by hand validation tests to assess the accuracy of your backup. You can verify backup folders without attaching the VM to your Hyper-V or VMware Hypervisor, or you can execute a full confirmation recovery to a clone and ensure that the recovered VM is able to boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup copy integrity can be checked proactively and fixed automatically as a component of the next backup operation.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To view a datasheet describing the key features of ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services, click:
Progent's ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet. (PDF - 310 KB)

How Progent Can Assist You to Benefit from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Server Hyper-V planning and deployment consultants and VMware-certified vCenter consultants can assist your organization to plan, deploy and maintain a backup/restore solution built on Altaro VM Backup software. Progent's Exchange consultants can help your business to utilize Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange environment, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud integration specialists can help you to utilize your Azure Block Blob storage service with Altaro software to protect your VMs.

Progent's disaster recovery preparedness consultants can help you to use Altaro's replication features and offsite backup options to protect your critical data and allow you to resume your core services rapidly in case of a calamity.

Periodic verification, testing, and enhancement of system restoration are critical and frequently overlooked requirements for effective disaster preparedness. In case of a disaster like a ransomware attack, these restoration drills can be the difference between an inconvenient loss of availability and an existential threat to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can assist you to design a workflow for regularly validating, testing, and improving your restore procedures so you can keep your backup strategy current and minimize the damage of a catastrophic event.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance (IA) consultants can assess the security posture of your backup solution and can assist your organization to deploy the latest tools and adhere to industry best practices for operating safely in the modern threat landscape.