Cloud and VM Integration and Management

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup/Recovery
ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a fully managed service intended to provide small and mid-size businesses a reliable and affordable solution for protecting Hyper-V and VMware-powered virtual machines (VMs). ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be used with local, remote, multi-location, and cloud based network models and also supports cost-effective backup to an Azure Blob storage service.

Key capabilities of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup include advanced Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup spacing as low as five minutes for reducing your window for data loss, enterprise-class encryption, granular recovery options for entire virtual machines or for specific files and emails, extensive integration with Windows Server Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware, and the ability to leverage Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to protect running virtual machines without downtime.

Progent is an Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and can provide a broad range of services to assist your business to design, deploy, test and debug a data protection system built on Altaro's VM Backup platform. Progent also has developed ProSight Data Protection Services Altaro VM Backup as a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) package to provide end-to-end monitoring and management of your data protection solution. Progent's Hyper-V consultants and VMware vCenter and vSphere integration experts can help you to design and maintain VM environments that use on-premises or offsite VMs or that use a hybrid network that incorporates both on-prem and cloud assets. In addition, Progent can provide workplace recovery preparedness expertise to help businesses to get ready for catastrophes such as ransomware assaults and widespread disasters.

Major Capabilities of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to address the data protection needs of typical small and midsize organizations and provides simplicity of operation as well as a comprehensive set of features usually available exclusively in enterprise-grade products. Altaro VM Backup protects widely used versions of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and works with most backup hardware:

Altaro VM Backup offers powerful features in crucial facets of backup includung backup replication, fast restoration, and management and reporting.

Replication
Altaro VM Backup delivers rapid, efficient, and safe backup for data protection and archiving plus remote data replication for dependable recovery. Top backup and replication features include:

• Ransomware Protection via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutability for cloud object storage allows tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be erased or modified by anyone including administrators or root users. Immutable storage adds another level of security and restoration ability in the event of a successful ransomware attack.
• Global Augmented In-Line Deduplication: In-line deduplication saves only altered data to backup devices or sites, reducing network traffic, cutting backup storage demands, and improving performance. Altaro's deduplication applies to data on single VMs as well as across many virtual machines.
• Continuous Data Protection: Instead of scheduling daily backups, you can reduce backup spacing to as short as five minutes to minimize your RPO.
• Concurrent Backups: You can back up many virtual machines simultaneously, which makes it possible to carry out backup operations within briefer off-hour time windows while more bandwidth is open and network throughput is less critical.
• Hot Backup: Integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service allows you to back up virtual machines without incurring downtime.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to protect VMs running in a Windows Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without Cluster Shared Volumes) or within a vCenter system supports larger implementations.
• Remote Replication: To facilitate business recovery, you can deploy the Altaro Offsite Server utility on an external server for keeping a copy of your backups at a remote location.
• Flexible Scheduling and Retention Policies: You can set different backup schedules and retention policies for individual VMs.
  
  Scheduling and retention policies for Altaro VM Backup are easy to set up, review and revise

• Application Specific Backups: Altaro VM Backup can use Volume Shadow Copy Service and all VSS Writers working inside the protected VM when making a backup. Applications such as Exchange and Microsoft SQL will sense the backup has happened and automatically run the appropriate maintenance procedures like truncating virtual log files.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Prior to copying your data to a backup destination, you have the ability to encrypt it using the AES-256 standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You have the ability to select which Virtual Disks to include or exclude in your virtual machine backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS): Besides your on-going and daily backups, you can set up a special schedule to create and archive a backup copy 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 least expensive storage alternative available on the Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup enables you to protect VMs hosted on-site, remotely or in the cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup VM Backup supports native backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi clouds. No extra resources operating in the cloud are needed to support backup storage.
• Back up to multiple off-premises locations: For improved robustness, you can create copies of VMs on multiple remote sites including multiple clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

• Recover as Clone: You can restore a VM backup to a new location with a new name, allowing the cloned virtual machine to operate beside the original VM. This avoids the necessity to write over active VMs.
• Restore to Different Host: You can recover a virtual machine backup to a different host. The virtual machine can be restored from the local backup location, or directly from the remote copy location. (You may not cross-restore between Hyper-V and VMware Hypervisors.)
• Boot from Backup: You can instantly boot any virtual machine version directly from the backup location either for testing or to create a major reduction in Recovery Time Objective in a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Recovery: You can rapidly recover specific files and folders from any virtual machine copy.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can create continuous backups of your virtual machines to an off-premises site and transfer instantly to the copy site in the event that a disaster takes out your main virtual machines. This can significantly reduce your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and put you back in business fast.
• Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can recover individual emails from the Exchange Mailbox.
  
  Altaro VM Backup enables you to restore individual emails from an Exchange Mailbox database

• Recover Different Backup Versions: You can restore from multiple periods instead of being limited to the latest copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: You can program or run manually validation tests to assess the integrity of your backup data. You can verify backup folders without attaching the VM to your Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can run a complete test recovery to a clone and ensure that the restored virtual machine is able to boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup storage accuracy can be checked on demand and repaired automatically as a component of the subsequent backup process.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To view or download a datasheet about 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 Your Business to Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V integration consultants and VMware-certified vCenter consultants can help your organization to plan, deploy and manage a backup/restore solution based on Altaro VM Backup software. Progent's Exchange consultants can help you to use Altaro VM Backup to protect your Exchange system, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud consulting specialists can assist your company to use your Azure Block Blob storage with Altaro to protect your VMs.

Progent's disaster recovery planning experts can help your business to use Altaro VM Backup's replication tools and offsite backup capability to protect your mission-critical data and enable you to resume your core operations rapidly in case of a catastrophe.

Regular validation, testing, and enhancement of data restoration are vital and frequently overlooked components for successful disaster preparedness. In case of a disaster like a ransomware attack, these restoration drills can be the difference between a temporary loss of availability and an existential crisis to a business. Progent can assist you to design a workflow for periodically validating, testing, and enhancing your restore procedures so you can keep your backup strategy current and minimize the damage of a catastrophic event.

Progent's GIAC information assurance (IA) consultants can gauge the security posture of your backup solution and can assist your organization to deploy the latest tools and follow industry best practices for operating securely in today's threat environment.