It is clear that the cloud is replacing physical storage formats due to its collaboration and access features,  its cost-effectiveness, and data security and resiliency. As organizations continue to store more and more, cloud storage will continue to increase in popularity. One of the most popular forms of cloud storage used by organizations today is Microsoft OneDrive. 

OneDrive is a productivity tool that allows users to synchronize files across different endpoints and share those files with other users in the enterprise. It is one of the several applications that make up the Microsoft 365 suite. The other applications include Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint. OneDrive is designed for users to store and share files, along with other collaboration capabilities that make not only daily jobs easier but also the management of shared files across different team members. The great thing about OneDrive being a cloud storage destination is that it enables employees to access their business files, as well as files shared by other people or teams, from different connected devices. In today’s world of remote working, access flexibility is incredibly useful.  

However, along with these valuable benefits, comes one major risk: data loss from a lack of OneDrive backups. 

How Microsoft 365 Protects Your Data 

Many may be thinking, “If Microsoft is providing the cloud storage, wouldn’t they be responsible for protecting the data in OneDrive?” The answer to that question is “Not exactly.” In the world of software-as-a-service or the SaaS model, data protection is considered a shared responsibility. Though Microsoft does take on the responsibility of application and infrastructure uptime, and it does provide many built-in features that feel like Office 365 backups, none of them really provide what is truly needed when it comes to Microsoft 365 backup and disaster recovery. Actual data protection against site outages, accidental deletion, and ransomware is the end user’s responsibility. 

Now, it was mentioned above that Microsoft does have native tools that help with some data protection. These include things like the Recycle Bin, deletion retention policies, and file versioning. In a similar article about Why SharePoint backup is needed. these features are described in greater detail. But at the end of the day, these features only protect you in the short term, and do not truly protect you against data loss.  

Lack of Microsoft 365 Backup Leaves You Exposed 

Because of this shared responsibility and lack of true built-in data protection features, it is critical that end users perform regular OneDrive backups (and other Microsoft 365 backups). Much like information stored on the internet, there are many threats to your data stored in OneDrive However, due to the shared nature of files in OneDrive, these threats can become even more dangerous. 

Accidental Deletion 

Because of the synchronization of files in OneDrive, something as simple as an accidental deletion of files becomes much more difficult to recover from. When an end user makes a change to a file (intentional or not), that change is synchronized with local storage on user endpoints, and then faithfully replicated to the OneDrive copy in the cloud. If the file is not backed up, not only is the original file gone for good, but any change is replicated across all connected devices in the cloud. 

Malware/Ransomware 

Keeping that in mind, you can imagine how disastrous a malware or ransomware attack would be if it were able to access data in OneDrive. Because OneDrive offers its users a straightforward way to sync the work that they have done offline to their storage as soon as they go online, this exposes your IT structures to a greater risk of external threats. Imagine an end user’s endpoint is infected with some form of malware and while offline this malware gets access to this user’s shared OneDrive. This malware may be encrypting or mass-deleting files, and then, when back online these changes are synchronized in the cloud. This malware can then spread further, slowly infecting all of the information, as well as other connected devices that are used to access the OneDrive data. This is even more serious if your company uses a BYOD (“Bring your own device”) model for remote and/or on-site work. 

Retrieval of Data from Past Employees 

When an employee leaves an organization, and their Microsoft 365 license is relinquished, Microsoft allows 30 to 90 days of time for the organization to migrate the user’s data or store a copy of the OneDrive data in another location, before it is deleted. Oftentimes, in order to recover unused cloud storage, organizations tend to delete unnecessary, redundant or outdated data. Without OneDrive backup in place, there is no way to recover specific files that might not seem important until later in the future 

Regulatory Compliance

It is not uncommon for organizations, especially in certain industries, to be subject to several different legal regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, or the GDPR. These regulations often dictate details about what type of data will be stored, how it can be gathered, and how long the companies are obligated to retain that data. These regulations also may require a second or backup copy of certain data to be stored at an alternate site. If these organizations fail to hold onto that second copy or cannot produce a certain piece of data when requested, they may face serious legal or regulatory repercussions. 

Effective OneDrive Backup and Recovery 

All of the above are reasons why organizations are utilizing DPX vPlus for their OneDrive backup. If you are serious about the security of your data stored, shared, and processed in Microsoft OneDrive, and other applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams, you should give DPX vPlus a try.  

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 a SharePoint item, 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. 

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. You can also watch a pre-recorded demonstration of vPlus backup and recovery for Microsoft 365. We’ll be happy to help you set things up.  

We are pleased to announce the latest release of Catalogic DPX vPlus, that expands cloud backup coverage and provides Microsoft 365 backup enhancements to provide unparalleled flexibility in designing and implementing data protection strategies. Known for its robust integration capabilities, DPX vPlus supports backup and recovery for dozens of virtual environments, containers, cloud environments, storage providers and applications.

In previous releases, DPX vPlus for Open VMs customers gained AWS EC2 backup and vPlus 5.2 continues this focus on cloud backup by supporting for Azure backup and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) backup.

vPlus 5.2 also added support for Virtuozzo Hypervisor backup with the direct access via SSH (both full and incremental hypervisor backups are supported).

A few points about backup storage destinations: storage configuration customization during the restore feature is now available for KVM, Virtuozzo, and Huawei Fusion Compute station. Also, incremental backup capability for the OpenStack environments has been added, and it is also supported in the Disk Attachment backup strategy with just cinder being used.

If you are using DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365 backup, there are some improvements for you too. Microsoft 365 users now have the option to restore contacts and calendars in vCard and iCalc formats. Also, you may have noticed that Microsoft recently updated their Teams API which caused some connection issues with earlier versions of vPlus. This is no longer the case, as this has been fixed.

vPlus 5.2 also introduces a new CLI which supports new syntax and bash completion – it is available side by side with the old one, as a technical preview, until it is finalized in the next release.

And last but not least, vPlus 5.2 added support for CentOS Stream 9 as the supported OS on which you can deploy DPX vPlus.

A full list of the new vPlus backup features and improvements are found below:

Virtual Environments Backup and Recovery

• Virtuozzo Hypervisor
• Azure Cloud
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Installation on RHEL/Centos Stream 9
• Storage customization during restore for KVM (standalone), Virtuozzo and Huawei FusionCompute
• Support for Red Hat OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP)
• OpenStack incremental backup using Disk Attachment (cinder) strategy
• Restore individual disk to datastore (Citrix, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV)

DPX vPlus User Interface Improvements

• Backup/restore transfer rate charts
• Command line interface (CLI) v2 – technical preview
• Multi-select filter for virtual machines list
• Restore window using a wizard
• Initial configuration wizard enhancements
• Support for Polish Language in WebUI 

Microsoft 365  Backup Improvements

• Download contacts and calendars in vCard and iCalc format
• Support for Microsoft Teams API
• Major performance improvements in task processing

Other vPlus Backup Improvements

• Mandatory cleanup of the import directory from a staging area
• Option to define schedules and policies with the same name

Summary

DPX vPlus continues to introduce useful features that truly improve data protection processes, automate backup and restore tasks, and ensure the highest standards of reliability.  No matter if you manage virtual environments based on open, commercial, or mixed solutions, Azure or GCP, or Microsoft 365 data, vPlus supports all of them under one backup license.

For further information on vPlus, take a look at the resources on our vPlus product page. Customers with support can access more detailed information on release notes on the Support page.  If you want to give vPlus a try, want to see a live demo, or have a question about the product, Contact us today!

As container technology and Kubernetes, specifically, continues to be considered the future of virtualization, the fact is that the traditional hypervisor market continues to grow. According to Maximize Market Research, by 2027 the hypervisor market is expected to reach a value of $4.45 Billion, a CAGR (Compound annual growth rate) of 29.78% from 2020. As has been the case for a decade, VMware continues to be the leader in market share, at 56.8% (a number that is down from 65.4% in 2008). Still, an interesting trend is beginning to take shape: increasingly, small and midsize organizations are leaving VMware’s high costs behind and are transitioning to several alternative open VM platforms. 

Diversifying Hypervisor Environments 

As these alternative hypervisors continue to develop and become more “enterprise ready,” many organizations find themselves with virtual environments consisting of multiple different hypervisors. There are many reasons why organizations may choose to diversify their virtual environments across different and open hypervisors: 

• Limit the cost of “enterprise” hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V, and Amazon EC2 by hosting lower-priority workloads on open VM options. 
• Integration limitations for backup software and other applications. 
• Test servers, sandbox environments, and offline servers can be run on open VM alternatives. 
• End-user preferences – KVM vs. Red Hat framework, Windows vs. Linux OS, etc.  

Backup for Multi-Hypervisor and Open VM Environments 

One of the difficulties for these diverse environments is ensuring that data across these multiple virtual environments are protected and available for quick recovery after a disaster. Most legacy data protection solutions on the market narrow the focus of their solutions to a few of the more popular hypervisors. This limitation often causes end-users to hesitate to store stateful workloads on these unsupported hypervisors or prevents them from taking advantage of more cost-effective alternatives altogether. With DPX vPlus, however, open VM backups are not an issue. 

DPX vPlus for Open VMs provides a trustworthy and convenient backup and restore solution for companies that enrich their infrastructure with multiple virtualization platforms. With the versatility of both DPX and DPX vPlus, businesses don’t need to worry looking for a new backup solution for their commercial workloads that use open hypervisors like KVM, RHEV/RHV, oVirt, PowerKVM, and Proxmox, or their edge computing solutions like Scale Computing.  From a single pane of glass, DPX vPlus users can backup and restore open VMs from all these and more open hypervisors using on-demand jobs and scheduled backup/recovery SLAs. 

Summary 

Until recently, companies were hesitant to rely on alternative hypervisors for their production/stateful workloads, especially across multiple virtual environments.  The uneasiness of trusting an unknown, open-source VM option prevented end users from taking advantage of the benefits of a heterogeneous virtual environment. But as the need for flexibility grows and the cost for hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V continue to rise, more companies are taking the open VM platform leap. 

We understand that every server virtualization platform has its pros and cons. DPX vPlus for Open VMs allows end users to take advantage of the pros of multiple open VMs or hypervisors by providing a centralized data protection system for heterogeneous virtual environments.   

If you would like to learn more about DPX vPlus for Open VMs, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it yourself. You can also watch the below pre-recorded demonstration of DPX vPlus backup and recovery for Open VMs.  We’ll be happy to help you set things up. 

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