We live in a world where data is the new oil. Not only is data valuable for you to maintain and run your business, but if you do not have a plan for data backup and recovery, we can end up paying a high price for it. According to a study by Touche Ross, 90% of businesses without a disaster recovery plan, will fail after a disaster.  Meanwhile, more and more critical organizational data is being created, stored, and shared outside of the data center. Oftentimes, this is close to or over 50% of organizational data.  This data lives on laptops, tablets, mobile devices and in cloud services, like Microsoft 365.  And yet this data can very easily be lost and lost for good without proper Microsoft 365 backup.

Being a SaaS productivity app, Microsoft 365 makes a lot of sense in today’s mobile world.  Easy access to documents through the cloud, improved collaboration on project using SharePoint and Teams, and its overall flexibility are just a few of the reasons why adoption of Microsoft 365 continues to rise year after year.  However, many organizations believe that moving data to a cloud-based SaaS solution means that data backup is no longer needed – that the provider takes on the responsibility to protect the data.  According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group report, one in four businesses don’t believe they need Microsoft 365 backup.  But this is simply not the case, including Sharepoint backup and OneDrive backup.

Microsoft provides what some describe as marginal efforts to protect and backup data, but it does not guarantee complete and fast restores of deleted or corrupted Microsoft 365 data. To put it simply, Microsoft ensures that it won’t lose your data.  However, the company doesn’t make any guarantees about recovering it for you. This means that the majority of the burden is placed on the customer.

Now if Microsoft 365 ensures that it won’t lose your data, you may be asking why you would ever need to worry about recovering your data?  The answer is that Microsoft’s promises are limited to protection against loss of service due to hardware failure or natural disaster, and short-term protection following user- or admin-error.  This means that there are several examples where data loss can occur outside these two areas.

1. Recovering an email or file that was deleted a long time ago:  Microsoft has a 93-day retention policy for both its first and second recycling bins.  This means that if a file or email has been deleted for more than 93 days, this file is permanently deleted from that recycling bin and cannot be recovered by Microsoft.
2. Human Error: This can include any actions like accidently or intentionally deleting important emails or files.  Perhaps an employee leaves the company and deletes the contents of his/her mail, attachments, documents, etc.  This is especially important when using OneDrive.  If a user deletes or modifies a file on their local device, that change, or deletion, is automatically synced with all connected devices.
3. Ransomware or Malware Attacks: A malware infection, or a ransomware attack can lead to encryption or deletion of your data in Microsoft 365.

With all that in mind, it is essential that you have a third-party Microsoft 365 backup provider to protect against accidental or malicious file deletion, other user errors, ransomware, and data corruption.  That is where DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365 backup comes in. Watch this short pre-recorded demonstration of how DPX vPlus provides Microsoft 365 backup and recovery, including Sharepoint backup and Teams backup

DPX vPlus is a Microsoft 365 backup and recovery solution for SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive, and Teams.  It provides the ability for granular backup and recovery of all aspects of the Microsoft 365 suite.  This means that if an email, contact, calendar item or file is accidentally deleted, modified, or lost, that data can be recovered to its original location, to an alternate user in the cloud, or downloaded locally.  A modern, web-based user interface makes administration and backup scheduling simple and efficient.  Deduplication, compression and encryption (in transit and at rest), ensures that your data is not only protected, but limits storage requirements and provides a scalable architecture.  When it comes to storage of the backup data, vPlus offers two options.  First, a customer can back up to a local file system on the vPlus appliance, or a mounted CIFS or NFS share.  Or, if you prefer to keep the cloud data in the cloud, vPlus can even store their Microsoft 365 backup data in an object storage destination like, Azure Blob or AWS S3.

If you would like to learn more about DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. We’ll be happy to help you set things up. 

For years, Catalogic’s DPX vPlus (previously known as vProtect) has been providing enterprise data protection for open source hypervisors that have been overlooked by the big backup vendors. While users of VMware and Hyper-V are never short on options when it comes to finding a trustworthy backup provider, including our own Catalogic DPX, the same is not true for the backup and recovery of open hypervisor or open virtual machine (VM) environments. 

Many organizations are using open VM environments to save on licensing costs, and similarly, many of the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors have their own hypervisors based on open source. These include Citrix Hypervisor, Huawei FusionCompute. KVM, Nutanix AHV, OpenStack, Oracle VM, RHEV/RHV, oVirt, PowerKVM, Proxmox, Scale Computing HC3 HyperCore, XCP-NG, and Xen.  However, the difficulty is that with these different hypervisors, there are not very many trustworthy solutions out there for VM backup and recovery of these environments and their data, for compliance and business continuity, including recovery from ransomware.

That is where DPX vPlus comes in as a standalone data protection solution, or it can be integrated with our enterprise DPX solution for ransomware protection, governance, and compliance. And now with its latest release, DPX vPlus version 5 supports Scale Computing HyperCore, or HC3 as it was previously known as.  

Scale Computing HyperCore is a KVM-based virtualization platform that is delivered as appliance.  It provides a simplified, scalable, cost-effective alternative to other edge computing and HCI solutions from Dell, HPE, Huawei, Nutanix VMware, and others.  However, like many of these HCI solutions, there is a gap when it comes to enterprise data protection and disaster recovery.  While HyperCore does have its own native snapshot capabilities to restore locally from, there is still a need to store full data backups off-site and on different media, for compliance, governance and even ransomware protection. That is why it is very important to utilize a robust backup storage solution like DPX vStor for this purpose. 

We are pleased to announce the release of Catalogic DPX 4.8.1, where we have taken a major step forward to enable our DPX customers to be amongst the best prepared to recovery from a cyberattack. This release builds on our foundational ransomware recovery and cyber resilience features to add a ground breaking new capability called DPX GuardMode, that provides proactive monitoring for early detection and notification of suspicious activity along with identifying and enabling the recovery of any affected data.

We also added many customer-driven enhancements including to DPX vStor, and we continued our theme of adding more foundational product resilience to enhance reliability and ability to respond rapidly to any vulnerabilities discovered at a later stage in the lifecycle.

We also announced DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365, a powerful data protection solution for Microsoft 365 and each of its components – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams – and DPX vPlus for Open VMs supports platforms such as Citrix Hypervisors, KVM, Nutanix Acropolis or AHV, Oracle VM, Proxmox, RHEV/oVirt, Scale Computing HyperCore/HC3, and XenServer, along with Amazon EC2. DPX vPlus delivers greater workload coverage for an organization’s edge and cloud data.

Let’s review the major new features of our DPX 4.8.1 product.  We’ll cover DPX vPlus in a future blog.

DPX GuardMode

With the new DPX GuardMode agent, we added the ability to change your security posture to be more proactive against ransomware posture by providing the ability to detect and get notified of suspicious behavior in your file systems and what files are potentially affected. Initially, this is for Windows only, and we’ll be adding Linux soon. To learn more, please watch this on-demand webinar, Adding Cyber Resilience to your Data Protection Strategy with Early Detection, with industry analyst Evaluator Group and Sathya Sankaran, COO of Catalogic Software.

Foundational Cyber Resilience

We migrated the DPX appliances to a different Linux distribution called AlmaLinux OS, an open-source, community-driven distribution that fills the gap left by CentOS when it discontinued stable releases. We updated the version of the distribution to the 8.5 release, which is 1:1 binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

All the JREs and Java stacks DPX uses have updated to OpenJDK 17.

These changes provide us with the ability to respond more rapidly to any future vulnerabilities discovered at a later stage in the lifecycle.

DPX vStor Management Updates

vStor Updater

This new feature adds the ability to update the appliance from within the vStor UI to new versions without having to interact with the underlying operating system CLI.

Relationship Grouping

One of the areas in which our customers are often commenting is the need to configure synchronization to a secondary vStor on a per-volume basis and not having a clear overview of the health of these individual synchronization sessions.

With this release of vStor, we have added a replication applet on the vStor Dashboard, which provides a graphical of the session status. We have also added the ability to group volumes in replication groups, where each volume will inherit the groups’ replication settings and schedule.

Virtualization Proxy

We released a pre-configured VMware Proxy virtual appliance to ease the deployment of a proxy server in the correct locations for optimized data transfer of the backup data. This is for VMware environments where DPX agentless for VMware is in use.

Deploying DPX and vStor Virtual Appliances in Hyper-V

The DPX and vStor appliances can now be deployed from a mounted ISO on the Hyper-V host and are completely installer driven.

Legal Hold for Amazon S3 Object Lock

You can now add a legal hold on your data on Amazon S3 to protect this data from being overwritten, even after the associated backup job has expired.

Report Enhancements

All reports visible in the HTML5 GUI of DPX have been enhanced and now report on the full dataset of DPX.

Summary

The DPX 4.8.1 release also contains other enhancements and bug fixes of course. For further information on DPX 4.8 and earlier releases, see the What’s New in DPX 4.8 and What’s New in DPX 4.8.1 document and other resources on the DPX products page. Customers with support can access more detailed information on release notes on the Support page.  For more information on Microsoft 365 backup and Open VM backups, please see DPX vPlus.

Whether it is ransomware attacks, human error or IT outages, every business needs an affordable and reliable data protection solution like Catalogic DPX to backup and instantly recover data to ensure business continuity. Have a question or want a live demo? Contact us today!

This month we announced Catalogic DPX 4.7.1 general availability. This release continues to build on the previous DPX 4.7.0 release by adding many new features and enhancements, including:

• One step Master server update – Updates of the Master appliance have improved to require only running the update script to update the entire master server appliance.
• Virtual Machine exclusions – Adds the ability to exclude specific virtual machines from Hyper-V backups based on explicit selection or pattern selection (e.g., test *or lab*)
• Better password security – Enhances login security for the HTML user interface by forcing a password change on the first login.
• Better job instance management. Further enhances the HTML user interface by adding the following functionality:
  • Allowing the ability to start or cancel any job type from the job monitor screen.
  • A download of all job logs from the job monitor screen.
• More local languages – Expands the DPX local language support by adding the Polish language to the HTML user interface as a supported language.
• Additional Cloud Providers – Adds support for Wasabi Cloud Storage and Scality Ring as supported cloud provider targets for Archive and NDMP Protection.

This release also contains several other enhancements and fixes. For further information, see the release notes and what’s new documents on our support site.

Contact us to learn about our current Catalogic DPX promotions:

• Free review of your current backup strategy for ransomware protection
• Scalable backup appliance guarenteed to reduce your backup storage costs
• NDMP Backup at $20 per TB per month that saves up to 80% vs. legacy solutions