Cloud and VM Integration and Management

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Machine Backup/Recovery
ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a fully managed subscription service designed to offer small and mid-size businesses a robust and low-cost option for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines. ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be deployed on-premises, remote, multi-site, and cloud network models and also offers cost-effective backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account.

Top features of ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection with backup intervals as low as five minutes for reducing your vulnerability to data loss, military-grade data encryption, granular restore alternatives for entire VMs or for individual files and emails, full support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and VMware, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to protect running virtual machines without disruption.

Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a wide range of services to help your business to design, implement, validate and troubleshoot a data protection solution based on Altaro's VM Backup technology. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) Altaro VM Backup as a managed service to deliver remote monitoring and management of your backup ecosystem. Progent's Windows Hyper-V consultants and VMware vCenter and vSphere integration experts can help you to design and manage virtual machine environments that utilize local or offsite VMs or that run in a hybrid network that combines on-prem and cloud-based assets. In addition, Progent offers business continuity preparedness expertise to help you to get ready for catastrophes such as ransomware attacks and widespread disasters.

Major Capabilities of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is built to address the backup/recover requirements of typical small and medium-size businesses and provides simplicity of management as well as a rich set of features typically found exclusively in enterprise-grade platforms. Altaro backs up widely used releases of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and works with most backup hardware:

Altaro VM Backup comes with powerful features in crucial areas of backup includung backup replication, fast restoration, and management and reporting.

Replication
Altaro VM Backup offers fast, efficient, and secure backup for data protection plus remote replication for reliable recovery. Top backup and replication features include:

• Ransomware Defense 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 modified or deleted by anyone including administrators or root users. This provides another level of security and restoration ability in the event of a ransomware breach.
• Global Augmented In-Line Deduplication: In-line deduplication saves only altered data to backup storage devices, conserving bandwidth, minimizing backup storage demands, and improving performance. Deduplication works with data on single virtual machines and across many VMs globally.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Rather than scheduling one-a-day backups, you can reduce backup intervals to as brief as five minutes to lower your Recovery Point Objective.
• Concurrency: You can back up many VMs simultaneously, allowing you to carry out backup operations during shorter low-activity time windows while more bandwidth is open and workload throughput is less urgent.
• Live Backup: Integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) allows you to back up VMs without going offline.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to back up VMs within a Windows Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without CSV) or in a vCenter environment allows larger deployments.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can set up Altaro's Offsite Server tool on an external 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.
  
  Scheduling and retention options for Altaro VM Backup are easy to configure, check and edit

• Workload Specific Backups: Altaro can use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service and all VSS Writers working within the target VM when making a backup. Applications like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL will sense the backup has taken place and automatically run the relevant maintenance tasks like truncating virtual log files.
• Military-Class Encryption: Prior to copying your data to a backup destination, you have the option of encrypting it using the 256-Bit AES standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or exclude in your VM backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving: On top of your continuous and daily backups, you can implement an additional backup schedule to create and archive a new backup copy each week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro supports backup to an Azure Block Blob account, which is the most affordable storage option available on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro VM Backup allows you to back up virtual machines 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 necessary to support backup storage.
• Back up to multiple remote datacenters: For better robustness, you can create copies of VMs on multiple remote locations including multiple clouds like Azure and Amazon S3.

• Restore as Clone: You can recover a VM backup to a new destination with a new name, allowing the cloned VM to run beside the original virtual machine. This avoids the necessity to overwrite active virtual machines.
• Recover to Different Host: You can recover a virtual machine backup to a different host. The VM can be recovered from the on-prem backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You cannot cross-recover between Windows Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can immediately boot any virtual machine copy directly from the backup device for verification or to create a major improvement in Recovery Time Objective in a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Recovery: You can quickly restore specific files and folders from any virtual machine backup.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can make ongoing copies of your virtual machines to a remote location and transfer instantly to the copy location in case a disaster disables your primary virtual machines. This can dramatically reduce your RTO and put your organization back in business fast.
• Microsoft Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can restore specific emails and attachments from the Exchange Mailbox.
  
  Altaro VM Backup allows you to restore individual emails from an Exchange Mailbox database

• Restore Different Versions: You can restore from different periods instead of being restricted to the latest backup.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: You can schedule or launch by hand test drills to assess the accuracy of your backup. You can validate backup folders without attaching the virtual machine to your Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can run a complete test restore to a replicant and ensure that the recovered VM can boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup copy integrity can be monitored proactively and fixed automatically as a component of the subsequent backup process.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To view or download 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 Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Server Hyper-V planning and deployment consultants and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter consultants can assist your organization to plan, deploy and manage a backup/restore solution built on Altaro VM Backup software. Progent's Exchange consultants can help you to use Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange system, and Progent's Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud integration experts can help your company to utilize your Azure Block Blob storage with Altaro to back up your VMs.

Progent's disaster recovery preparedness consultants can help your business to use Altaro VM Backup's replication tools and offsite backup capability to protect your critical data and allow you to resume your core operations rapidly in the event of a catastrophe.

Ongoing verification, testing, and enhancement of data restoration are vital and often underappreciated requirements for effective disaster preparedness. 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's Altaro VM Backup experts can assist you to create a workflow for periodically verifying, testing, and enhancing your restore procedures so you can keep your backup strategy current and contain the impact of a catastrophic incident.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance (IA) specialists can assess the security profile of your backup solution and can help your business to deploy the latest tools and follow industry best practices for working securely in the current threat environment.