Cloud and VM Integration and Management

ProSight Data Protection Services - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup/Recovery
ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a managed service intended to provide small and middle-size businesses a reliable and low-cost solution for protecting Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines. Altaro VM Backup can be deployed local, remote, multi-site, and hybrid cloud network models and also supports cost-effective backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob storage account.

Top features of ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup include industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup intervals down to five minutes for reducing your exposure to lost data, military-grade encryption, granular restore options for whole virtual machines or for individual files, full integration with Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter and vSphere, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service technology to protect live VMs with no downtime.

Progent is an Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and can provide a wide range of services to assist you to plan, implement, validate and debug a data protection system built on Altaro's VM Backup technology. Progent also has developed ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) Altaro VM Backup as a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) package to deliver remote management of your data protection system. Progent's certified Hyper-V experts and VMware vCenter and vSphere specialists can help your organization to design and maintain VM deployments that utilize on-premises or remote virtual machines or that use a hybrid architecture that incorporates both local and cloud resources. Also, Progent can provide workplace recovery preparedness consulting to assist businesses to get ready for catastrophic events such as ransomware attacks and widespread disasters.

Major Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to fulfill the data protection needs of most small and midsize businesses and provides simplicity of management as well as a comprehensive set of features typically available only in enterprise-grade products. Altaro VM Backup protects popular versions of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware and works with standard backup media:

Altaro VM Backup comes with advanced capabilities in vital areas of data protection such as replication, prompt recovery, and management and reporting.

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

• Ransomware Protection via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutable backup for cloud storage allows tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be erased or modified by anyone including administrators. This provides an extra level of protection and recoverability in case of a successful ransomware attack.
• Global Augmented In-Line Deduplication: In-line deduplication sends only altered data to backup devices or sites, reducing network traffic, minimizing backup storage demands, and improving performance. Deduplication works with data on lone virtual machines and on many VMs.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Rather than scheduling daily backups, you can schedule backup intervals to as short as five minutes to minimize your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Concurrency: You can back up multiple VMs simultaneously, which makes it possible to carry out backup operations during briefer off-hour time windows when more network bandwidth is available and network throughput is less urgent.
• Live/Hot Backup: Integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) permits you to back up VMs without going offline.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to back up VMs running in a Windows Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without Cluster Shared Volumes) or within a vCenter environment supports large-scale deployments.
• Remote Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can set up the Altaro Offsite Server utility on an external server for keeping 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 simple to configure, review and edit

• Workload Consistent Backups: Altaro VM Backup can utilize Volume Shadow Copy Service and all VSS Writers working within the target VM when making a backup. Apps including Exchange and Microsoft SQL will sense the backup has happened and automatically run the appropriate maintenance jobs such as truncating virtual log files.
• Military-Class Encryption: Prior to copying your data to a backup destination, you have the ability to encrypt it with the AES-256 encryption standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclude: You have the ability to 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 implement a special schedule to create and archive a new backup copy every week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro enables backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob account, which is the most affordable storage option available on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup allows you to back up VMs hosted on-premises, remotely or in a public cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup supports seamless backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi clouds. No additional resources operating in the cloud are necessary to provide storage for backup.
• Back up to multiple off-premises locations: For better robustness, you can make copies of virtual machines on multiple off-premises locations including multiple clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

• Restore as Clone: You can restore a VM backup to a new destination with a new name, allowing the cloned VM to operate side by side with the original VM. This avoids the necessity to overwrite live virtual machines.
• Restore to Different Host: You can recover a VM backup to a new or different Hypervisor. The virtual machine can be restored from the on-prem backup location, or directly from the remote copy location. (You cannot cross-restore between Windows Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can instantly boot any VM version from the backup device either for verification or to achieve a major improvement in RTO during a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Restore: You can rapidly recover individual files and folders from any VM backup.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can create ongoing copies of your virtual machines to a remote location and transfer instantly to the backup location in case a disaster disables your primary VMs. This can significantly shrink your Recovery Time Objective and get you back in business quickly.
• Microsoft Exchange Item-Level Recovery: You can restore specific emails from the Exchange Mailbox database.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup permits you to restore specific emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Recover Different Versions: You can recover from multiple points in time rather than being limited to the last copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Testing: This feature lets you program or launch by hand test drills to confirm the integrity of your backup data. You can verify backup folders without connecting the VM to your Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can execute a full test restore to a replicant and ensure that the recovered VM can boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup storage accuracy can be checked proactively and repaired automatically as a component of the next backup operation.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To see a datasheet about the major features 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 Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V planning and deployment experts and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter specialists can assist your organization to design, deploy and manage a backup/recover system based on Altaro VM Backup software. Progent's Exchange consultants can assist you to use Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange environment, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud integration specialists can help you to use your Azure Block Blob storage service with Altaro to back up your virtual machines.

Progent's disaster recovery planning consultants can assist your business to use Altaro VM Backup's replication features and remote backup options to protect your mission-critical data and allow you to resume your vital operations quickly in the event of a calamity.

Ongoing validation, testing, and optimization of data restoration are vital and often overlooked requirements for successful 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 an existential threat to a business. Progent can help you to design a workflow for regularly validating, testing, and enhancing your recovery procedures so you can keep your backup strategy up to date and minimize the impact of a disastrous event.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance experts can evaluate the security posture of your backup system and can assist your organization to deploy the latest tools and adhere to industry leading practices for working safely in the current threat landscape.