Computer Security and Compliance Consulting

ProSight Data Protection Services - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup/Recovery
ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a fully managed subscription service intended to offer small and mid-size businesses a reliable and affordable option for backing up and restoring Hyper-V and VMware-powered VMs. ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be used with on-premises, remote, multi-site, and cloud environments and also offers budget-friendly backup to an Azure Block Blob storage service.

Top features of ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup intervals down to five minutes for minimizing your window for lost data, military-grade data encryption, granular restore alternatives for whole VMs or for specific files and emails, extensive support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and VMware, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service technology to back up live VMs with no disruption.

Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a wide assortment of services to assist you to design, implement, validate and troubleshoot a backup solution based on Altaro's VM Backup technology. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) Altaro VM Backup as a subscription service to provide remote monitoring and management of your backup/restore system. Progent's certified Hyper-V experts and VMware specialists can assist you to plan and maintain virtual machine environments that use on-premises or remote VMs or that run in a hybrid network that combines local and cloud assets. Also, Progent offers business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning expertise to assist you to get ready for catastrophic events such as ransomware attacks and widespread disasters.

Key Capabilities of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is built to handle the data protection needs of typical small and midsize businesses and provides ease of management plus a comprehensive set of features usually available exclusively in enterprise-class platforms. Altaro protects popular releases of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and supports standard backup media:

Altaro VM Backup offers advanced capabilities in vital facets of backup includung replication, fast recovery, and management and reporting.

Replication
Altaro VM Backup delivers rapid, efficient, and safe backup for data protection and archiving plus offsite data replication for reliable restoration. Major backup and replication capabilities include:

• Ransomware Defense leveraging Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutable backup for cloud storage enables tamper-proof data for a set duration so that backup data cannot be modified or deleted by anyone including root users. This provides another level of protection and restoration ability in the event of a successful ransomware attack.
• Global Augmented In-Line Deduplication: In-line variable block size deduplication sends only changed data to backup devices, conserving bandwidth, minimizing storage requirements, and improving throughput. Altaro's deduplication works with data on lone VMs and on multiple VMs.
• Continuous Data Protection: Instead of running one-a-day backups, you can schedule backup spacing to as short as five minutes to lower your Recovery Point Objective.
• Concurrent Backups: You can back up many virtual machines concurrently, which makes it possible to carry out backup operations within briefer low-activity time windows when more network bandwidth is open and network throughput is less urgent.
• Live/Hot Backup: Altaro's integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service permits you to back up VMs without requiring downtime.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to protect VMs within a Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without CSV) or in a vCenter system supports larger implementations.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate business recovery, you can set up the Altaro Offsite Server tool on an external server for keeping a copy of your backups at a different 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 easy to configure, review and revise

• Workload Specific Backups: Altaro can utilize Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and all VSS Writers running inside the protected virtual machine when making a backup. Apps such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL will be aware the backup has happened and automatically proceed with the appropriate maintenance procedures like truncating transaction logs.
• Military-Class Encryption: Before saving data to a backup device, you have the ability to encrypt it with the AES-256 standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclude: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or ignore in your VM backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving: On top of your continuous and daily backups, you can set up an additional backup schedule to make and archive a backup version each week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro enables backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob account, which is the lowest priced storage alternative offered on the Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro VM Backup allows you to protect VMs hosted on-site, remotely or in a public cloud

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

• Restore as Clone: You can recover 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 VM backup to a new or different host. The VM can be restored from the local backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You may not cross-restore between Windows Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can immediately boot any virtual machine copy 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 Restore: You can quickly recover specific files and folders from any virtual machine copy.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can make ongoing copies of your VMs to a remote location and switch instantly to the backup site in case a disaster takes out your primary virtual machines. This can dramatically improve your RTO and get your organization back in business fast.
• Microsoft Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can retrieve individual emails and attachments from the Exchange Mailbox.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup permits you to recover specific emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Restore Various Versions: You can restore from multiple points in time rather than being limited to the latest backup.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: You can program or launch manually test drills to confirm the integrity of your backup data. You can validate backup folders without attaching the virtual machine to your Hyper-V or VMware Hypervisor, or you can execute a full confirmation restore to a clone and ensure that the recovered virtual machine can boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup storage integrity can be checked proactively and repaired automatically as part of the subsequent backup process.

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

How Progent Can Assist You to Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V planning and deployment consultants and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter specialists can help you to plan, deploy and maintain a backup/restore system built on Altaro VM Backup. Progent's Exchange experts can assist your business to utilize Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange system, and Progent's Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud integration specialists can assist your company to use your Azure Block Blob storage with Altaro to back up your virtual machines.

Progent's business continuity preparedness consultants can help your business to use Altaro VM Backup's replication features and remote backup capability to protect your critical data and enable you to resume your core services quickly in case of a calamity.

Ongoing validation, testing, and optimization of system restoration are critical and frequently overlooked requirements for proper disaster readiness. In the event of a disaster like a ransomware breach, these restoration drills can be the difference between an inconvenient loss of availability and a life-or-death threat to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can help you to create a program for periodically verifying, testing, and optimizing your recovery procedures so you can keep your backup strategy up to date and minimize the damage of a catastrophic event.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance (IA) consultants can evaluate the cybersecurity profile of your backup solution and can help you to implement advanced tools and follow industry best practices for operating securely in today's threat landscape.