Network Outsourcing for Small and Medium-size Companies

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup
ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a fully managed subscription service intended to provide small and mid-size businesses a robust and low-cost option for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines (VMs). ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be used with on-premises, remote, multi-site, and hybrid cloud network models and also supports budget-friendly backup to a Microsoft Azure Blob storage service.

Top capabilities of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are advanced Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection with backup spacing down to five minutes for reducing your exposure to data loss, military-grade encryption, flexible recovery alternatives for entire VMs or for specific files, full support for Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter and vSphere, and support for Volume Shadow Copy Service technology to protect live VMs with no disruption.

Progent is an Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and can provide a wide assortment of services to help your business to plan, deploy, validate and debug a backup system built on Altaro's VM Backup platform. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services Altaro VM Backup as a subscription service to provide remote management of your data protection ecosystem. Progent's Windows Hyper-V consultants and VMware specialists can assist you to plan and maintain VM deployments that utilize on-premises or remote virtual machines or that use a hybrid architecture that incorporates both on-prem and cloud-based assets. In addition, Progent offers business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning expertise to assist businesses to get ready for catastrophic events such as ransomware assaults and widespread disasters.

Key Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to address the backup/recover requirements of most small and midsize organizations and provides ease of operation as well as a rich set of features usually found only in enterprise-grade platforms. Altaro VM Backup protects popular versions of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and supports standard backup media:

Altaro VM Backup comes with advanced capabilities in critical facets of data protection includung replication, fast restoration, and management and reporting.

Replication
Altaro VM Backup offers rapid, efficient, and secure backup for data protection and archiving plus remote data replication for reliable recovery. Top backup and replication features include:

• Ransomware Protection via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutability for cloud storage allows tamper-proof data for a set duration so that backup data cannot be erased or modified by anyone including administrators. This provides another level of security and recoverability in the event of a successful ransomware attack.
• Augmented In-Line Deduplication: In-line deduplication sends only changed data to backup devices or sites, conserving bandwidth, minimizing storage requirements, and enhancing throughput. Deduplication works with data on single virtual machines and on many virtual machines globally.
• Continuous Data Protection: Rather than performing one-a-day backups, you can schedule backup intervals to as brief as five minutes to minimize your Recovery Point Objective.
• Concurrency: You can back up many VMs concurrently, allowing you to conduct backup processes during briefer off-hour time windows while the most bandwidth is open and workload performance is less urgent.
• Live/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 back up VMs within a Windows Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without Cluster Shared Volumes) or within a VMware vCenter system supports larger implementations.
• Remote Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can deploy Altaro's Offsite Server tool on a remote server for keeping a copy of your backups at a different site.
• Flexible Scheduling and Retention Policies: You can set different backup schedules and retention policies for individual VMs.
  
  Scheduling and retention options for Altaro VM Backup are easy to set up, review and edit

• Workload Specific Backups: Altaro VM Backup can use Volume Shadow Copy Service and all VSS Writers running inside the target VM when executing a backup. Applications such as Exchange and Microsoft SQL will be aware the backup has happened and automatically run the appropriate maintenance jobs like truncating transaction logs.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Prior to saving data to a backup device, you have the option of encrypting it with the 256-Bit AES standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclude: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or ignore in your VM backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS): Besides your continuous and daily backups, you can set up a special schedule to create and archive a backup version every week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Microsoft Azure: Altaro VM Backup supports backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account, which is the lowest priced storage alternative offered on the Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup allows you to back up VMs hosted on-site, remotely or in the cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup supports native backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi. No extra resources operating in the cloud are needed to provide backup storage.
• Back up to multiple off-premises datacenters: For improved robustness, you can make copies of virtual machines on multiple off-premises sites including multiple public clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3.

• Restore as Clone: You can restore a VM backup to a new location with a new name, allowing the cloned VM to run alongside the original VM. This avoids the necessity to write over active virtual machines.
• Restore to Different Host: You can restore a VM backup to a different host. The VM can be restored from the on-prem backup location, or directly from the remote copy location. (You cannot cross-recover between Windows Hyper-V and VMware Hypervisors.)
• Boot from Backup: You can immediately boot any VM copy directly from the backup location for verification purposes or to create a major reduction in Recovery Time Objective during a disaster recovery scenario.
• File-Level Restore: You can quickly restore specific files and folders from any VM backup.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can create continuous backups of your VMs to a remote site and switch instantly to the copy site in case a calamity disables your main virtual machines. This can significantly improve your RTO and get your organization back online fast.
• Microsoft Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can retrieve individual emails from within the Exchange Mailbox.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup enables you to restore individual emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Recover Different Backup Versions: You can restore from different periods rather than being restricted to the last backup copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: You can schedule or run by hand test drills to confirm the integrity of your backup. You can verify backup folders without connecting the virtual machine to your Windows Hyper-V or VMware Hypervisor, or you can execute a complete confirmation recovery to a clone and ensure that the restored virtual machine is able to boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup storage integrity can be monitored proactively and repaired automatically as a component of the subsequent backup operation.

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

How Progent Can Help You to Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Server Hyper-V planning and deployment consultants and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter consultants can help you to design, deploy and manage a backup/recover system built on Altaro VM Backup software. Progent's Exchange consultants can assist your business to use Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange environment, and Progent's Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud consulting experts can assist your company to utilize your Azure Block Blob storage with Altaro software to back up your VMs.

Progent's business continuity preparedness experts can assist your business to use Altaro's replication tools and remote backup capability to safeguard your critical data and allow you to restart your vital services rapidly in the event of a catastrophe.

Regular validation, testing, and optimization of system restoration are vital and often overlooked requirements for proper disaster preparedness. In the event of a disaster such as a ransomware breach, these recovery drills can be the difference between an inconvenient period of downtime and an existential crisis to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can help you to create a program for regularly validating, testing, and enhancing your recovery procedures in order that you can keep your backup strategy up to date and minimize the damage of a catastrophic incident.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance (IA) specialists can gauge the security profile of your data protection solution and can help you to deploy advanced technology and follow industry leading practices for working safely in the modern threat landscape.