Network Outsourcing for Small and Mid-size Businesses

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 offer small and mid-size organizations a robust and affordable option for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-powered VMs. Altaro VM Backup can be used with local, offsite, multi-site, and cloud environments and also offers cost-effective backup to a Microsoft Azure Blob storage account.

Top features of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup spacing down to five minutes for reducing your vulnerability to lost data, enterprise-class encryption, granular restore options for entire virtual machines or for individual files and emails, extensive support for Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter and vSphere, and support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to back up running virtual machines with no downtime.

Progent is an Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a wide range of services to help your business to design, implement, test and troubleshoot a backup solution built on Altaro's VM Backup platform. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) Altaro VM Backup as a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) package to provide end-to-end management of your backup system. Progent's Windows Hyper-V experts and VMware vCenter and vSphere integration experts can help you to plan and manage VM deployments that utilize local or remote virtual machines or that work in a hybrid network that combines local and cloud assets. In addition, Progent can provide business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning consulting to assist you to get ready for catastrophes such as ransomware attacks and widespread disasters.

Key Capabilities of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to handle the backup/restore needs of typical small and midsize organizations and provides ease of operation plus a rich range of capabilities typically found exclusively in enterprise-class platforms. Altaro protects widely used releases of Hyper-V and VMware and supports most backup hardware:

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

Replication
Altaro VM Backup offers rapid, efficient, and secure backup for data protection plus offsite data replication for dependable restoration. Major backup and replication features include:

• Ransomware Protection leveraging Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutable backup for cloud object storage allows tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be erased or modified by any user including administrators or root users. Immutable storage provides an extra level of protection and recoverability in the event of a ransomware breach.
• Augmented In-Line Deduplication: Altaro's in-line deduplication sends only altered data to backup storage devices, reducing network traffic, cutting storage requirements, and improving throughput. Deduplication applies to data on single VMs and across many virtual machines globally.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Instead of performing daily backups, you can schedule backup spacing to as short as five minutes to lower your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Concurrency: You can back up many virtual machines at the same time, which makes it possible to conduct backup operations during shorter off-hour time windows when more bandwidth is available and workload performance is less urgent.
• Hot Backup: Integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service permits you to back up VMs without incurring downtime.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to protect VMs running in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without Cluster Shared Volumes) or in a vCenter environment allows larger implementations.
• Remote Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can deploy the Altaro Offsite Server tool 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.
  
  Backup scheduling and retention options for Altaro are simple to set up, check and revise

• Workload Specific Backups: Altaro can utilize Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and any VSS Writers running within the target VM when executing a backup. Applications such as Exchange and Microsoft SQL will be aware the backup has taken place and automatically run the relevant maintenance tasks such as truncating virtual log files.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Prior to copying your data to a backup device, you have the ability to encrypt it using the AES-256 encryption standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or ignore in your virtual machine backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS): Besides your on-going and scheduled backups, you can implement a special backup schedule to make and archive a new backup copy each week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro VM Backup supports backup to an Azure Block Blob account, which is the least expensive storage option offered on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro VM Backup allows you to back up virtual machines hosted on-premises, remotely or in the cloud

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

• Restore as Clone: You can restore a VM backup to a new destination with a new name, allowing the cloned VM to run alongside the original VM. This avoids the necessity to write over live virtual machines.
• Recover to Different Host: You can recover a VM backup to a different Hypervisor. The VM can be restored from the local backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You cannot cross-restore between Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can immediately boot any virtual machine copy from the backup location for testing purposes or to achieve a significant improvement in RTO during a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Recovery: You can quickly restore specific files from any VM backup.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can make continuous backups of your virtual machines to an off-premises location and switch immediately to the copy site in case a disaster takes out your primary VMs. This can dramatically shrink your Recovery Time Objective and put you back online quickly.
• Exchange Item-Level Recovery: You can recover individual emails and attachments from the Exchange Mailbox database.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup permits you to restore specific emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Recover Various Backup Versions: You can recover from different points in time rather than being restricted to the last backup.
• Sandbox Restores and Testing: You can schedule or run manually test drills to confirm the integrity of your backup data. You can verify backup folders without connecting the virtual machine to your Hyper-V or VMware Hypervisor, or you can execute a complete confirmation restore to a clone and verify that the recovered VM is able to boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup copy accuracy can be monitored on demand and repaired automatically as part of the next backup process.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To view a datasheet describing the major capabilities 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 Benefit from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Server Hyper-V planning and deployment experts and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter specialists can help your organization to plan, implement and maintain a backup/recover system built on Altaro VM Backup. Progent's Exchange experts can assist your business to utilize Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange environment, and Progent's Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud consulting specialists can help your company to use your Azure Block Blob storage service with Altaro software to back up your VMs.

Progent's business continuity planning consultants can help your company to use Altaro VM Backup's replication features and offsite backup capability to protect your critical data and enable you to restart your vital operations rapidly in the event of a calamity.

Periodic validation, testing, and optimization of data restoration are vital and often underappreciated requirements for proper disaster preparedness. In the event of a disaster like a ransomware attack, these recovery drills can be the difference between a short period of downtime and an existential threat to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can assist you to create a workflow for regularly verifying, testing, and improving your restore procedures so you can keep your backup solution current and contain the damage of a catastrophic incident.

Progent's GIAC information assurance (IA) experts can assess the cybersecurity posture of your data protection solution and can help your organization to implement the latest technology and follow industry leading practices for working safely in the modern threat environment.