Data Security and Compliance Consulting

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup
ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a fully managed subscription service intended to provide small and middle-size businesses a reliable and low-cost option for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-powered virtual machines. Altaro VM Backup can be deployed local, remote, multi-location, and hybrid cloud environments and also supports cost-effective cloud backup to an Azure Blob storage service.

Key capabilities of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce storage size, Continuous Data Protection with backup intervals down to five minutes for reducing your exposure to lost data, military-grade data encryption, flexible restore options for entire VMs or for individual files and emails, full support for Windows Server Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and VMware, and the ability to leverage Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to protect live VMs without downtime.

Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a broad assortment of services to assist you to design, deploy, validate and troubleshoot a backup system based 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 remote management of your data protection solution. Progent's Hyper-V consultants and VMware vCenter and vSphere integration experts can help your organization to design and maintain virtual machine environments that utilize on-premises or remote VMs or that run in a hybrid architecture that incorporates both on-prem and cloud assets. Also, Progent offers disaster recovery preparedness expertise to assist businesses to rebound from calamities such as ransomware attacks and widespread disasters.

Major Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is built to address the backup/restore requirements of typical small and midsize businesses and offers simplicity of management as well as a rich range of capabilities typically found exclusively in enterprise-grade platforms. Altaro VM Backup backs up widely used versions of Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and supports most backup hardware:

Altaro VM Backup offers powerful capabilities in critical areas of backup includung backup replication, prompt recovery, and centralized management.

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

• Ransomware Protection via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutability for cloud storage enables tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be modified or deleted by anyone including root users. Immutable storage adds another level of security and recoverability in the event of a ransomware breach.
• Augmented In-Line Deduplication: Altaro's in-line deduplication sends only changed data to backup devices, conserving bandwidth, minimizing storage demands, and enhancing throughput. Altaro's deduplication works with data on single virtual machines as well as across many virtual machines globally.
• Continuous Data Protection: Rather than scheduling daily backups, you can reduce backup spacing to as brief as five minutes to lower your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Concurrency: You can back up multiple virtual machines simultaneously, allowing you to carry out backup operations during briefer low-activity time windows when the most bandwidth is open and network throughput 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 running in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without Cluster Shared Volumes) or in a VMware vCenter environment supports larger implementations.
• Remote Replication: To assist with business recovery, you can set up the Altaro Offsite Server tool on a remote server for storing 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 policies for Altaro VM Backup are easy to configure, check and revise

• Application Consistent Backups: Altaro can utilize Volume Shadow Copy Service and all VSS Writers working within the protected virtual machine when making a backup. Applications including Exchange and Microsoft SQL will be aware the backup has taken place and automatically run the appropriate maintenance procedures such as truncating VLFs.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Before copying your data to a backup destination, you have the option of encrypting it using the 256-Bit AES encryption standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You can specify 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 an additional backup schedule to make and archive a backup copy every week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro enables backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account, which is the least expensive storage alternative available on the Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup enables you to back up VMs hosted on-premises, offsite or in a public cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup VM Backup allows native backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi. No extra resources running in the cloud are needed to provide backup storage.
• Back up to multiple offsite locations: For improved robustness, you can create copies of VMs on multiple off-premises locations including multiple public clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3.

• Recover as Clone: You can recover a VM backup to a new destination with a new name, allowing the cloned VM to run side by side with the original virtual machine. This avoids the need to overwrite live VMs.
• Recover to Different Host: You can recover a virtual machine backup to a new or different host. The virtual machine can be restored from the on-prem backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You may not cross-recover between Windows Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can immediately boot any VM copy from the backup location either for verification or to achieve a major improvement in RTO during a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Recovery: You can rapidly recover individual files and folders from any virtual machine copy.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can make ongoing backups of your VMs to an off-premises site and switch instantly to the backup location in the event that a disaster takes out your main virtual machines. This can dramatically shrink your RTO and put you back in business fast.
• Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can restore individual emails from within the Exchange Mailbox database.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup allows you to recover individual emails from an Exchange Mailbox database

• Restore Various Backup Versions: You can restore from multiple points in time rather than being limited to the last backup copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: You can schedule or launch by hand validation tests to confirm the integrity of your backup data. You can verify backup folders without attaching the virtual machine to your Windows Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can execute a complete test recovery to a replicant and verify that the restored virtual machine can boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup storage integrity can be monitored on demand and repaired automatically as part of the next backup process.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To see 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 Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V planning and deployment consultants and VMware-certified vCenter specialists can assist you to plan, implement and maintain a backup/recover solution based on Altaro VM Backup. Progent's Exchange experts can assist you to use Altaro VM Backup to protect your Exchange system, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud integration specialists can assist your company to utilize your Azure Block Blob storage with Altaro to protect your virtual machines.

Progent's disaster recovery planning consultants can help your business to use Altaro's replication features and remote backup options to protect your mission-critical data and allow you to restart your vital operations rapidly in case of a calamity.

Periodic validation, testing, and optimization of system recovery are crucial and frequently underappreciated components for effective disaster readiness. In the event of a disaster like a ransomware attack, these recovery drills can be the difference between a temporary loss of availability and a life-or-death crisis to a business. Progent can help you to create a workflow for periodically validating, testing, and optimizing your restore procedures so you can keep your backup strategy up to date and minimize the damage of a disastrous incident.

Progent's GIAC information assurance (IA) experts can assess the cybersecurity profile of your data protection solution and can help you to implement advanced tools and adhere to industry best practices for operating safely in the modern threat environment.