Computer Security and Compliance Consulting

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup/Recovery
ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a managed service intended to provide small and middle-size organizations a reliable and low-cost option for protecting Hyper-V and VMware-based VMs. ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be deployed on-premises, offsite, multi-location, and cloud based network models and also supports cost-effective cloud backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob storage account.

Key features of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup include advanced Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce backup storage size, Continuous Data Protection with backup spacing down to five minutes for reducing your window for data loss, enterprise-class encryption, flexible restore alternatives for whole virtual machines or for individual files and emails, full support for Windows Server Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and VMware, and support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to back up live virtual machines without downtime.

Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and can provide a broad range of services to help your business to design, implement, validate and troubleshoot a data protection solution based on Altaro's VM Backup platform. Progent also has developed ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) Altaro VM Backup as a subscription service to deliver end-to-end management of your data protection ecosystem. Progent's Windows Hyper-V consultants and VMware specialists can help your organization to design and maintain virtual machine environments that use local or offsite virtual machines or that run in a hybrid architecture that combines local and cloud-based assets. Also, Progent can provide business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) preparedness expertise to help you to get ready for calamities such as ransomware assaults and natural disasters.

Key Capabilities of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is built to handle the backup/restore requirements of typical small and medium-size organizations and provides ease of operation as well as a comprehensive range of capabilities typically found exclusively in enterprise-class platforms. Altaro backs up widely used versions of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware and works with most backup hardware:

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

Replication
Altaro VM Backup delivers fast, economical, and secure backup for data protection and archiving plus remote data replication for reliable recovery. Top backup and replication capabilities include:

• Ransomware Defense leveraging Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutability for cloud object storage allows tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be modified or deleted by anyone including administrators or root users. Immutable storage provides another level of protection and restoration ability in case of a ransomware breach.
• Global Augmented In-Line Deduplication: Altaro's in-line deduplication sends only changed data to backup storage devices, conserving bandwidth, minimizing backup storage demands, and improving performance. Altaro's deduplication applies to data on single VMs as well as on multiple VMs.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Rather than scheduling one-a-day backups, you can reduce backup intervals to as short as five minutes to minimize your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Concurrency: You can back up multiple virtual machines concurrently, allowing you to conduct backup operations during briefer off-hour time windows when the most network bandwidth is available and network throughput is less urgent.
• Live Backup: Integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service permits you to back up virtual machines without going offline.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to protect virtual machines running in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without CSV) or within a vCenter environment supports large-scale implementations.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate business recovery, you can deploy Altaro's Offsite Server utility on a remote 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 policies for Altaro VM Backup are easy to configure, check and edit

• Workload Consistent Protection: Altaro can utilize Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and all VSS Writers working inside the protected virtual machine when executing a backup. Apps such as Exchange and Microsoft SQL will be aware the backup has taken place and automatically run the relevant maintenance tasks such as truncating transaction logs.
• Military-Class Encryption: Prior to copying data to a backup destination, you have the option of encrypting it with the AES-256 standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or ignore in your virtual machine backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving: Besides your on-going and scheduled backups, you can set up a special backup schedule to create and archive a backup copy every week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro VM Backup allows backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account, which is the least expensive storage option available on the Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro VM Backup permits you to protect virtual machines hosted on-site, remotely or in a public cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup VM Backup allows seamless backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi clouds. No additional resources running in the cloud are required to provide backup storage.
• Back up to multiple off-premises locations: For better robustness, you can create copies of virtual machines on multiple remote locations including multiple public clouds such as Azure and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

• Recover as Clone: You can restore a virtual machine backup to a new destination with a new name, permitting the cloned virtual machine to operate side by side with the original VM. This eliminates the need to write over active virtual machines.
• Recover to Different Host: You can recover a VM backup to a different host. The VM can be recovered from the local backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You cannot cross-recover between Hyper-V and VMware Hypervisors.)
• Boot from Backup: You can instantly boot any VM version from the backup location for testing purposes or to create a major reduction in RTO during a disaster recovery scenario.
• File-Level Restore: You can quickly restore specific files from any virtual machine copy.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can make continuous copies of your VMs to an off-premises site and transfer immediately to the backup site in the event that a calamity disables your main virtual machines. This can dramatically reduce your Recovery Time Objective and get you back online quickly.
• Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can retrieve individual emails from within the Exchange Mailbox database.
  
  Altaro VM Backup enables you to restore specific emails from an Exchange Mailbox database

• Restore Various Backup Versions: You can restore from different periods instead of being limited to the last copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: This feature lets you program or launch manually tests to confirm the accuracy of your backup. You can validate backup folders without attaching the VM to your Windows Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can execute a complete test restore to a replicant and verify that the restored virtual machine is able to boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup copy accuracy can be checked on demand and fixed automatically as part of the subsequent backup operation.

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 Help Your Business to Benefit from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V planning and deployment experts and VMware-certified vCenter specialists can assist your organization to design, implement and maintain a backup/recover solution based on Altaro VM Backup. Progent's Exchange experts can help your business to utilize Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange environment, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud consulting experts can help you to use your Azure Block Blob storage service with Altaro software to protect your VMs.

Progent's disaster recovery preparedness experts can assist you to use Altaro's replication tools and offsite backup capability to protect your mission-critical data and allow you to restart your vital services quickly in the event of a catastrophe.

Periodic verification, testing, and optimization of system recovery are vital and often overlooked requirements for effective disaster readiness. In case of a disaster like a ransomware breach, these restoration drills can be the difference between a temporary period of downtime and a life-or-death crisis to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can assist you to design a workflow for regularly validating, testing, and optimizing your restore procedures so you can keep your backup solution current and contain the impact of a disastrous incident.

Progent's GIAC information assurance experts can evaluate the security profile of your data protection solution and can assist your company to implement the latest tools and adhere to industry leading practices for operating securely in the modern threat landscape.