Computer Outsourcing for Medium-size Companies

ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Server Backup
ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a managed subscription service intended to provide small and middle-size businesses a reliable and affordable option for backing up and restoring Hyper-V and VMware-powered virtual machines (VMs). ProSight DPS Altaro Backup can be used with local, offsite, multi-location, and cloud network models and also supports cost-effective backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob storage service.

Top features of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup are industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut backup storage size, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup intervals as low as five minutes for minimizing your exposure to data loss, military-grade data encryption, flexible recovery options for entire VMs or for individual files, full support for Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter and vSphere, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to protect live VMs without disruption.

Progent is an Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a broad range of services to assist your business to plan, deploy, validate and troubleshoot a backup/restore solution based on Altaro's VM Backup technology. Progent also has developed ProSight Data Protection Services Altaro VM Backup as a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) package to provide remote monitoring and management of your backup/restore solution. Progent's certified Hyper-V experts and VMware vCenter and vSphere integration experts can help you to plan and maintain virtual machine deployments that utilize local or offsite virtual machines or that work in a hybrid network that combines on-prem and cloud-based assets. In addition, Progent offers disaster recovery planning consulting to help you to get ready for calamities such as ransomware assaults and widespread disasters.

Major Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is built to address the data protection requirements of typical small and midsize businesses and offers ease of management plus a rich range of capabilities typically found exclusively in enterprise-class platforms. Altaro backs up widely used versions of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and supports standard backup media:

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

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

• Ransomware Defense via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutability for cloud object storage enables tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be modified or deleted by any user including root users. Immutable storage provides an extra level of security and restoration ability in the event of a ransomware breach.
• Augmented In-Line Deduplication: Altaro's in-line variable block size deduplication sends only changed data to backup devices, conserving bandwidth, minimizing backup storage requirements, and enhancing performance. Altaro's deduplication works with data on single virtual machines as well as on multiple VMs globally.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Instead of performing daily 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 simultaneously, which makes it possible to conduct backup processes during shorter off-hour time windows while the most bandwidth is open and network throughput is less urgent.
• Hot Backup: Integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service permits you to back up virtual machines without requiring downtime.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to back up VMs within a Windows Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without Cluster Shared Volumes) or in a VMware vCenter environment allows large-scale deployments.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can set up the Altaro Offsite Server utility on a remote server for keeping 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 set up, review and edit

• Workload Specific Protection: Altaro can use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and any VSS Writers running inside the target virtual machine when making a backup. Apps like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL will sense the backup has happened and automatically proceed with the appropriate maintenance tasks like truncating virtual log files.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Prior to copying your data to a backup device, you have the option of encrypting it with the AES-256 standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You can specify which Virtual Disks to include or exclude in your virtual machine backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving: On top of your on-going and daily backups, you can implement an additional schedule to make and archive a new backup copy every week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro allows backup to an Azure Block Blob account, which is the most affordable storage alternative available on the Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro VM Backup permits you to protect VMs hosted on-site, remotely or in the cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup allows seamless backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi clouds. No extra resources running in the cloud are necessary to support backup storage.
• Back up to multiple off-premises locations: For better robustness, you can make copies of VMs on multiple remote locations including multiple clouds such as Azure and Amazon Simple Storage Service (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 VM. This avoids the need to write over live VMs.
• Restore to Different Host: You can recover a VM backup to a new or different host. The VM can be recovered from the local backup location, or directly from the remote copy location. (You may not cross-recover between Windows Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can immediately boot any virtual machine copy from the backup device for testing or to achieve a significant reduction in Recovery Time Objective (RTO) during a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Restore: You can rapidly restore individual files from any virtual machine backup.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can make ongoing backups of your VMs to a remote location and switch immediately to the backup location in the event that a disaster disables your main virtual machines. This can significantly improve your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and put your organization back online fast.
• Exchange Item-Level Restore: You can retrieve specific emails and attachments from the Exchange Mailbox.
  
  Altaro VM Backup enables you to recover individual emails from an Exchange Mailbox database

• Restore Different Backup Versions: You can restore from multiple periods rather than being restricted to the last backup copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: This feature lets you program or run manually tests to confirm the integrity of your backup data. You can validate backup folders without connecting the VM to your Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can execute a full confirmation recovery to a replicant and ensure that the restored VM is able to boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup copy accuracy can be checked proactively and fixed automatically as part of the next backup process.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To see a datasheet describing the major features of ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services, click:
Progent's ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet. (PDF - 310 KB)

How Progent Can Help You to Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V planning and deployment experts and VMware-certified vCenter specialists can help your organization to plan, implement and manage a backup/recover solution based on Altaro VM Backup. Progent's Exchange experts can assist you to utilize Altaro VM Backup to protect your Exchange environment, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud integration experts can assist you to utilize your Azure Block Blob storage service with Altaro to back up your virtual machines.

Progent's disaster recovery planning experts can help your business to use Altaro's replication tools and offsite backup capability to safeguard your mission-critical data and enable you to resume your core operations rapidly in case of a catastrophe.

Regular verification, testing, and enhancement of data recovery are critical and frequently underappreciated requirements for proper disaster readiness. In the event of a disaster such as a ransomware breach, these recovery drills can be the difference between a short loss of availability and an existential threat to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can help you to create a workflow for regularly verifying, testing, and enhancing your restore procedures so you can keep your backup solution current and contain the damage of a disastrous incident.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance consultants can assess the security profile of your backup system and can help your business to implement the latest tools and adhere to industry best practices for working securely in the current threat environment.