Microsoft 365 – Why OneDrive Backup is Needed

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.  

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01/27/2023 0 Comments

Microsoft 365 – Why SharePoint Backup is Needed

SharePoint has been the go-to-service for organizations when it comes to managing large volumes of shared data in the cloud. The SharePoint platform makes sharing of documents amongst teams an easy process, especially since remote team-work has become the norm. Because of this, SharePoint oftentimes contains essential, business data, and this exposes a major gap in the SharePoint on-line platform: risk of data loss if you don’t do Microsoft 365 backups.  

 

Now, if you’ve ever experienced losing a document that wasn’t backed up, imagine how much worse it can be when an organization’s entire SharePoint site at risk! SharePoint does not provide any native backup and restoration features to protect the data contained in it. Data loss in SharePoint can be caused by a number of different factors, accidental or otherwise, including threats from inside and outside of your organization. This is why a SharePoint backup solution is a necessity.  

 

How Microsoft 365 Protects Your Data 

Like the other applications in Microsoft 365, SharePoint does provide built-in data protection tools that may feel like SharePoint backup. Features like the Recycle Bin, and the ability to set up retention policies for deleted data can help you restore information that was inadvertently deleted. However, these features have limitations when files are not used on a regular basis and when they have been deleted for a longer period of time.  

 

Recycle Bin

When SharePoint files are deleted, they are moved to the Recycle Bin, where they are stored for 93 days. If an end user were to empty their personal Recycle Bin, the items are transferred to the second-stage Recycle Bin. The second-stage bin is hidden from the end user, only accessible by your Microsoft 365 administrator, and will retain the files for the remainder of the 93 days. Regardless of the Recycle Bin that holds the files, after the 93 days, the files will be purged and cannot be recovered by the administrator. Another important thing to consider is that files in Recycle Bins still count against storage quota. When your total volume of your data exceeds your storage quota, files are removed from the Recycle Bin in order to make space for new items. 

 

Retention Policies 

Retention policies including litigation holds, can be applied to an entire SharePoint site to prevent data deletion of any kind. As long as the hold policy is in effect, data in the site cannot be deleted by the user. However, this leaves a vulnerability where rogue administrators, or infected end users with privileged access can still delete items from a site. SharePoint does provide Retention Lock, which will ensure that no one can manipulate an existing retention policy. One thing to keep in mind when considering Retention Lock, is that enabling this feature is an irreversible action. While a site sit in the locked state and no data is being cleaned/deleted, storage space can quickly be consumed, requiring you to purchase additional storage space. 

 

As a SaaS solution, SharePoint functions using a “share responsibility” model when it comes to data protection. This essentially states that Microsoft is responsible for keeping the SharePoint application and the underlying infrastructure running, but Microsoft 365 subscribers are responsible for securing and backup up their own data. If an organization were to suffer a data loss event within the Microsoft 365 cloud, it is up to the organization, not Microsoft, to recover the lost data from their own Microsoft 365 backups 

 

Lack of Microsoft 365 Backup Leaves You Exposed 

As mentioned above, SharePoint is a great solution for sharing documents and other crucial information in a collaborative environment. However, since the data is available to be used, modified, and deleted by multiple remote end users, the data can be exposed to several different dangers. However, no matter how severe these dangers are, all of them can be dealt with by simply having a functional SharePoint backup ready to be rolled back in case a serious data loss occurs. Here are some of the worst dangers, which can easily be prevented with a SharePoint backup: 

 

Accidental Deletion 

Human error remains the leading cause of most data loss. A user may delete a file by accident, or perhaps overwrite good data with something that is incorrect. Since SharePoint is commonly used for team-related work and utilized by many different employees simultaneously, it is not unusual for data to shift places, or to be removed by someone once it becomes redundant or outdated.  

 

While Microsoft offers features like the Recycle Bin to restore recently deleted data, it is very common for files to be deleted, or data to be overwritten without anyone noticing. Also, data that was once deemed unnecessary, or outdated, may become relevant again in the future. However, restoring such data, which was deleted for a longer time period, is not possible in SharePoint unless you have a third party SharePoint backup in place. Even worse, this type of data is often removed in bulk, which can, in turn, lead to the unintended deletion of large amounts of important information. 

 

Malware/Ransomware 

Ransomware represents one of the single biggest threats to SharePoint data. Because data is accessed from several different endpoints, SharePoint is vulnerable to possible malware and ransomware attacks from external sources. If a user accidentally opens an infected link or a file with malware inside, they can infect all of the documents and information stored within SharePoint.  

Once ransomware infects a SharePoint site, it can spread to other files, causing them to become encrypted. If this happens, very little can be done to retrieve this data. However, utilizing an external and air-gapped SharePoint backup can be a simply way to restore the effected data back to a point-in-time before the attack occurred.  

 

Internal Threats 

Malicious threats of data loss don’t always come from outside the organization. A disgruntled employee, or administrator may take it upon themselves to delete large amounts of data before leaving the organization. They may also empty the Recycle Bin or modify existing retention policies which can make recovery of the data very difficult. Having a SharePoint backup solution with file-level recovery capabilities can easily recover those files to the original location, or even migrate that data to a new owner or a new SharePoint site.  

 

Effective SharePoint Backup and Recovery 

SharePoint, as well as the rest of the applications making up the Microsoft 365 suite, provides great value for organizations, especially those working collaboratively from various locations and endpoints. However, Microsoft leaves end users vulnerable to data loss because its native data protection features do not fully protect you from all data loss scenarios. With that in mind, it is imperative that SharePoint users, and Microsoft 365 users in general, utilize a third-party backup solution for those disaster recovery and day-to-day recovery situations.  

 

That is where DPX vPlus comes in. 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 backup, 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.  

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01/19/2023 0 Comments

DPX vPlus 5.2 Expands Cloud Backup Coverage to Azure and Google Clouds

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, Azure Stack HCI 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
  • Azure Stack HCI
  • 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!

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12/21/2022 0 Comments

DPX 4.9 Adds Proactive Ransomware Shield for Linux and Improves Quality of Alerts for Backup Admins

We are pleased to announce the release of Catalogic DPX 4.9, where we continue to build upon our commitment to providing one of the most cyber resilient data protection and backup coverage matrices for private, public, and hybrid-cloud environments. This release adds to our industry leading ransomware recovery and cyber resilience features by building on the DPX GuardMode for Windows capability made available in DPX 4.8.1.

GuardMode provides proactive monitoring for early detection and notification of suspicious activity along with identifying and enabling the recovery of any affected data. Before DPX 4.9, this feature was limited to Windows, but DPX 4.9 now offers GuardMode for Linux servers and Samba shares.  In addition, backup administrators can now benefit from increased quality of alerts, where GuardMode measures the level of file entropy and compares known magic signatures on files suspected to be impacted. GuardMode uses active, live forensic techniques instead of analyzing backup data that lags security incidents by several hours, days, and even weeks.

DPX 4.9 also delivered improvements to the web-based HTML UI, including support for Block Backup, Restore, and support for archival of those block-based backups. We also added several improvements to different DPX services, including reporting and event service monitoring.

We have also added several improvements to the use of DPX vStor in this release. This includes the ability to archive backup copies from a replicated vStor, multi-factor authentication, and an easier way to install vStor on a physical server.

And finally, DPX 4.9 includes many general improvements to existing DPX features. All new features of our DPX 4.9 product are listed below:

DPX Cyber Resilience

  • GuardMode for Linux

Adds a Linux ransomware detection agent with the ability to detect and notify an administrator of possible suspicious activity on the host. This is an upgrade to the already present Windows agent that adds a layer of ransomware detection and alerting to the DPX enterprise.

  • Encrypted Files Detection and Encryption Tracking

Adds an agent feature that detects encrypted files and tracks the encryption process to provide a list of affected files through a REST API. This allows administrators to improve their understanding of the infection scope as well as provides a list of affected files to restore.

  • Syslog Support

Adds syslog as a notification target for notifications.  This allows administrators to plug in GuardMode agent notifications into their existing security event collection workflows (for example, into a SIEM solution.)

DPX Services

  • Support for Block Backup and Restore in HTML UI

Adds the option of scheduling Block Backups and all corresponding restore options (File Restore, Instant Access Mapping, Backup Virtualization, Application) to HTML UI.  Now, the user can run block backup and restore workloads without relying on the Java GUI by using the HTML UI or REST API, which is faster and opens up new automation or integrations possibility.

  • Support for Double Protection for Block Backup

Adds option of Double Protection in the HTML UI. The Administrator can now configure Double Protection (Archiving) via the HTML UI more responsively and intuitively. REST APIs are available for this feature as well.

  • Reporting Improvements

Adds the ability to generate PDF versions of the reports, scheduling of reports, and the option to send them via email. Also introduces a new report for 24-hour job status overview.

  • Event Service Improvements

Adds more Master Server events to be received by the DPX event service. This allows an administrator to configure granular email notifications for more types of events from DPX services, including backup jobs, status changes and more.

  • Appliance Operating System Update to Alma Linux 8.7

Migrated the appliance operating system to a downstream Linux distribution from Red Hat and upgraded to a current release.

DPX Core 

  • Archive from Alternate/Replicated DPX vStor

Adds the ability to archive from a replicated vStor.  This allows the Administrator the flexibility to configure backup to a primary DPX vStor at a branch office then replicate to a central site vStor, and to also archive data from the secondary vStor to Cloud/Tape/DiskDirectory, and then restore to any location.

  • Microsoft Azure Blob and Alibaba Object Storage support

Adds Microsoft Azure Blob and Alibaba Object Storage support as Archive/NDMP cloud targets.

  • Catalog Condense Improvements

Catalog Condense now cleans up Cloud and DiskDirectory storage.

  • Integrating DPX Core Services to Linux systemd Service Manager

Uses systemd to manage cmagent/nibbler services on RedHat/CentOS 7.6+ and SUSE 12+.

  • Adding New Platforms for Agentless VMware Backup Proxies

Support RHEL, CentOS, OEL, and AlmaLinux 8.0~8.3 as proxy nodes for Agentless VMware backup.

  • New BMR ISO for Linux kernel v4.18

New Linux BMR ISO to support Linux kernel v4.18.

DPX vStor – Software-Defined Backup Appliance

  • Addition of MFA

Adds a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to both UI and console access.

  • Password Reset Improvements

Adds the ability to reset password on HTML UI.

  • Physical Installation ISO

Creates ISO installation image that can be used to install vStor on physical appliances.

Summary

For further information on DPX 4.9, see the What’s New in DPX 4.9.0 document and other resources on the DPX products page. Customers with support can access more detailed information in the release notes on the Support page.  For more information on Microsoft 365 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!

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12/14/2022 0 Comments

Backup and Restore for Multi-Hypervisor Environments

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. 

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11/23/2022 0 Comments

Protect Your Microsoft 365 Data with DPX vPlus

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. 

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09/20/2022 0 Comments

Data Protection for Scale Computing HyperCore Environments with DPX vPlus

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

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. 

DPX vPlus allows Scale Computing users to perform agentless backup and recovery of the data for their HyperCore or HC3 environments to a backup destination of their choice. The list of supported destinations includes local file systems, NFS shares, cloud object storage like Amazon S3 or Backblaze, or DPX vStor. DPX vPlus itself is a software solution that runs as a virtual appliance with an easy-to-use user interface where backup and recovery policies can be defined for each specific use case, hypervisor, or backup storage destination 
Additional features specific to Scale Computing HyperCore or HC3 include full and incremental backups, name- and tag-based policy assignment, as well as the ability to include pre- and post-snapshot command execution.   

If you are an existing Scale Computing user, or are looking at Scale Computing HyperCore as an alternative to another HCI environment, and you would like to learn more about how DPX vPlus can protect your data, please check out the following resources:  

Or if you are ready to jump right in, request a live DPX vPlus demo now to see how DPX vPlus can be deployed to backup Scale Computing HyperCore and open VM platforms to provide granular VM-level data protection, disaster recovery and compliance. 

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08/16/2022 0 Comments

Granular File Restore and Ransomware Protection for Micro Focus OES Backups

Catalogic DPX and Micro Focus OES Backup

Catalogic Software is not one of those data protection vendors that have abandoned Micro Focus Open Enterprise Server (OES) backups. Catalogic DPX has provided industry-leading Novell backup and recovery for OES and Groupwise products since 1997, and we even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep integration for GroupWise backup. And unlike many other OES backup vendors, we are still committed to the Micro Focus OES, including full support for Micro Focus OES 2018 SP3 and OES 2023 release.

Unitrends and Micro Focus OES Backup

For decades, Novell and more recently Micro Focus OES customers have relied on Unitrends for OES backup and granular recovery. Using its OES agent, Unitrends allowed users to protect all aspects of their OES environment, including files, directories, and web-application management tools like eDirectory, iFolder and iManager. It also offered the ability to granularly restore individual files and folders, which is extremely important for OES customers since applications like eDirectory are responsible for identity-based management, networked storage, and file directories for employees, clients, and/or students. Though recovery of an entire OES server due to corruption or a disaster is necessary at times, the majority of recovery jobs are lost or accidently deleted files from these directories.

Disappointed and Surprised Unitrends Customers

Unitrends customers have recently been discovering some upsetting news – oftentimes receiving this surprise after they notice their backup jobs have been failing and have opened a support ticket. Post its acquisition by Kaseya, Unitrends has published a list of unsupported operating system agents, including the agent that supports OES backup. Unitrends is treating OES servers like any other virtual or physical machine. It provides server-level backups and restores but without an agent, it has lost the file and object-level granularity that is needed for OES data protection.

What this means for legacy Unitrends customers is that when an administrator receives a request from an employee who accidently deleted an important file, they can no longer recover the individual file. Instead, they need to restore the entire virtual machine and then figure out how to migrate or copy the specific OES object like eDirectory to its original location. This is difficult enough for those customer using OES in a virtual environment and it is near impossibility for those who run their OES on physical machines.

This change in direction by Unitrends is forcing hundreds of customers to either seek alternative backup solutions, or to move away from Micro Focus OES and other operation systems altogether. In fact per their unsupported agent notice: “Unitrends strongly recommends pursuing alternate methods of protecting data residing on these Operating Systems.”

DPX is That Alternative Micro Focus OES Backup Solution

If you are one of those Micro Focus OES or GroupWise customers searching to find that replacement for Unitrends, look no further than Catalogic DPX. DPX has provided industry leading backup and recovery for Novell products since 1997. We have even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep GroupWise integration. And unlike Unitrends and many other vendors, we have never backed away from our commitment to the Novell family of products, even after the acquisition by Micro Focus.

Catalogic DPX support for OES includes cluster configuration, GroupWise environments, and backup of standalone and shared volumes, eDirectory, etc. It provides the ability to perform full, incremental, and differential backups, and these backups, unlike with Unitrends, can be at the volume, directory, and even individual file level. Then, more importantly, files can be restored with security, metadata, and file-attributes/trustee rights still intact. For more information on OES cluster and GroupWise support, please see Catalogic DPX is the Smart Choice for Micro Focus OES Customers.

DPX even has its own software-defined storage repository called DPX vStor that can act as a flexible and scalable disk directory for your OES backups. Built on open source components, vStor can use any block storage without restrictions, freeing you from expensive Unitrends backup appliances and vendor lock-in. vStor supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support.

Protecting your Micro Focus OES Backups from Ransomware

Data Protection is often the last line of defense when it comes to ransomware attacks. DPX delivers a secure data protection solution with instant recoverability to help ensure you can protect your backup data set from ransomware and recover data in an instant when you need it.

 

With DPX, you have integrated ransomware protection:

  • Support for the 3-2-1-1 rule provides a robust data protection solution with verified scheduled recoveries for automated recovery testing.
  • 3 copies of your data
  • 2 copies stored on different storage media types
  • 1 of the copies offsite or in the cloud on immutable media
  • 1 copy verified as recoverable
  • Encryption of backup data in transit over the network and at rest via DPX vStor volume encryption

To learn more, please see Recommendations From FBI Cyber Division on How to Reduce Risk from Ransomware Attacks and watch this free webinar: Protect and Recover Micro Focus OES from Ransomware Attacks.

Now is the Time to Change Your OES Backup Vendor

Just because Unitrends and others are no longer providing the backup and recovery capabilities that you need, it does not mean OES customers are out of options. Catalogic DPX is a proven, cost-effective and reliable alternative, and Catalogic is committed to providing effective, granular Micro Focus OES backup and recovery for all aspects of their environment.

Regarding ransomware protection, if your OES backup solution is not hardened against recent vulnerabilities with all the required patches and updates (remember log4j?), or if it does not provide you with immutable backups with granular recovery, now is the time to make a change.

If you would like to learn more about Catalogic DPX, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. We’ll be happy to provide a review of your data protection environment and help you set up a proof of concept.

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06/29/2022 0 Comments

Catalogic DPX is the Smart Choice for Micro Focus OES Customers in Education

In 2014, Micro Focus acquired Novell, in a move that extended the mainframe software provider’s reach into Linux. This acquisition included Novell’s Open Enterprise Server (OES). Micro Focus OES is a server operating system that provides a virtual computing environment and shared network resources, giving it the functionality of an enterprise-scale server operating system. OES consists of multiple modules and components around files, storage, directory, and web application management which are essential for shared files, print networks, driver deployment, identity-based management, and network connectivity for Windows, Mac, and Linux client devices.

Protecting Micro Focus OES Data in an Education Environment

All these things make OES a very useful tool for school districts, universities, and colleges around the world. Having the ability to provide shared network resources to faculty and staff, as well as to students, provides benefits for school administrators. Due to the reliance on these shared resources, protecting the shared files is extremely important.

For a specific school district and an art university, having the need to recover lost or deleted files became an everyday occurrence. For years, they had relied on Unitrends to provide them with granular backup and recovery of their OES data. However, for both organizations, the administrators arrived to work one day and realized that their scheduled backup jobs had failed. As they usually would in these instances, they opened a support ticket with Unitrends. But this time, they were told that OES-specific backups are no longer supported.

Replacing Unitrends with Catalogic DPX for Micro Focus OES

Given Unitrends no longer supports their OES backup agent, these customers would have to instead utilize Unitrends virtual machine snapshots to protect their OES data. With this workaround, they would lose the ability to perform single-file recovery of an OES resource, something they previously did on a regular basis.

Luckily for them, Catalogic DPX provides a replacement for Unitrends that is fully committed to supporting Micro Focus OES. DPX has provided industry leading protection and recovery for Novell products since 1997, and we are committed to continuing that. We have even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep GroupWise integration. And unlike Unitrends and other data protection vendors, Catalogic has never backed away from our commitment to the Novell family of products, even after the acquisition by Micro Focus. DPX customers will be able to continue to perform granular backup and restores of their Micro Focus OES data.

DPX Cluster-level and GroupWise Support for OES

In Figure 1, the virtual node is labeled as “cluster.” The item “V1” represents the shared resource. Objects oes-lx-c1, oes-lx-C2, and oes-lx-C3 are the server nodes in the cluster.DPX provides intelligent data protection for OES, which begins with being cluster-aware. This means that by using a virtual node concept, where all individual server nodes are represented together as a single entity, DPX is able to ensure that data is not backed up twice (from two different nodes in the cluster), and if a cluster node fails during backup of a shared resource, DPX continues to execute the backup by switching the task through the failover node. This ensures that critical infrastructure information is always protected.

Then, when it comes to recovery, restore of OES data is simplified. The user needs only to select the virtual node object and DPX is smart enough to restore the correct volume. The operator does not need to know the source of the data, or which node performed the backup. This avoids confusion and ensures a quicker, trouble-free recovery process.

DPX support for Open Enterprise Server includes cluster configuration, GroupWise environments, and backup of standalone and shared volumes, eDirectory, etc. It provides the ability to perform full, incremental, and differential backups, and these backups, unlike with Unitrends, can be targeted at the volume, directory, and even individual file level. Then, more importantly, files can be restored with security, metadata, and file-attributes/trustee rights still intact.

Figure 1. DPX OES Cluster

Figure 2. DPX GroupWise Environment

DPX-GroupWise-Environment-1

In Figure 2, you can see the layout for DPX GroupWise environment:

  • (Po) shows Post Office resources
  • (Dom) shows Domain Objects
  • (DMS) Document Management Systems Library
  • Other objects can include Binary Large Objects (Blb), and even (TMP) which are any other directories referenced by /HOME flags

DPX even has its own software-defined storage repository called vStor that can act as a disk directory for your OES backups. vStor will then perform deduplication and com-pression so that your storage is maximized.

DPX is Committed to Micro Focus OES Support

This school district and this art university are just two examples of the many Micro Focus OES customers who have been surprised by Unitrends dropping support for OES. By no longer supporting granular backup and recovery for OES, school administrators would have to resort to full VM restores, to recover a single lost or deleted file. This is simply inefficient and a waste of their time and resources. DPX, on the other hand, is committed to continuing to provide enterprise-level data protection, including the granularity needed for these school districts, universities, and colleges using Micro Focus OES.

If you are like many others and have been left out in the cold with no OES support by your backup vendor, give DPX a try. If you would like to learn more about DPX, 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 with the trial and provide our expertise to assess your backup environment for ransomware recovery.

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05/11/2022 0 Comments

Catalogic DPX is Not Backing off from Commitment to Micro Focus OES

History of Novell Open Enterprise Server

In early 2005, Novell, since then acquired by Micro Focus, made a splash in the Linux pool with their Open Enterprise Server (OES) product. Based initially on Netware and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and later just on SLES, Micro Focus OES is an enterprise-scale server operating system that provides essential shared services, including networked storage, file and print services, identity management, and network connectivity for Windows, Mac, and Linux client devices.

Protecting Micro Focus OES Environments

Now, as you would expect, where Micro Focus OES is a large part of an organization’s shared network services and computing environment, it is a critical part of IT infrastructure. So much so that if services were to go off-line for whatever reason, your users would be out of commission. With that in mind, it is crucial that the data stored in your OES environment be backed up and protected.

Over the years, a wide variety of data protection vendors have provided adequate Micro Focus OES backup and recovery. OES users had some options when it came to choosing a backup provider. However, as time has gone on, those same vendors have slowly moved on from the Novell family of products, leaving many OES customers with no way to protect their data.

Catalogic DPX and Micro Focus Backup Partnership

Catalogic Software is not one of those data protection vendors that backing off from OES backup. Catalogic DPX has provided industry-leading Novell OES backup and recovery for Novell products since 1997, and we even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep GroupWise integration for Groupwise backup. Unlike many other vendors, we have never backed away from our commitment to the Novell family of products, even after the acquisition by Micro Focus.

DPX Cluster-level support for OES Backup

DPX provides intelligent data protection for OES, which begins with being cluster-aware. This means that by using a virtual node concept, where all individual server nodes are represented together as a single entity, DPX can ensure that data is not backed up twice (from two different nodes in the cluster). Suppose a cluster node fails during the backup of a shared resource. In that case, DPX continues to execute the backup by switching the task to the failover node, ensuring that critical infrastructure information is always protected.

In Figure 1, the virtual node is labeled as a “cluster.” The item “V1” represents the shared resource. Objects oes-lx-c1, oes-lx-C2, and oes-lx-C3 are the server nodes in the cluster.

When it comes to recovery, the restoration of OES data is simplified. The user needs only to select the virtual server object, and DPX is smart enough to restore the correct volume. The operator doesn’t need to know the data source or which node performed the backup; this avoids confusion and ensures a quicker, trouble-free recovery process.

Figure 1

DPX support for Linux and NSS File System, eDirectory, and More

DPX supports full, incremental, and differential backups, which can be targeted at the volume, directory, or individual file level. Files can be restored with security and metadata and file-attributes / trustee rights still intact.

DPX Supports the following for OES backup:

  1. Cluster configuration OES
  2. GroupWise environments
  3. Backup of standalone and shared NSS volumes,
  4. Backup of eDirectory, etc.

In Figure 2, you can see the layout for the DPX GroupWise environment:

  1. (Po) shows Post Office resources
  2. (Dom) shows Domain Objects
  3. (DMS) Document Management Systems Library
  4. Other objects can include Binary Large Objects (blb) and even (TMP), which are any other directories referenced by /HOME flags

DPX has its software-defined storage repository called vStor that can act as a disk directory for your OES backups. DPX vStor performs deduplication and compression so that your storage is maximized, as well as replication to another backup node for redundancy and disaster recovery. Backup data can be archived to cloud or tape for long-term retention.

Figure 2

Conclusion

As you can see, the backup and recovery of your Micro Focus OES 2018 infrastructure are fully supported by Catalogic. If the recovery is as severe as a massive hardware failure, or a server failure in a multi-server OES cluster, or something less critical like post office corruption, individual email messages lost, or a user account deleted, having the ability to quickly and easily recover that information is incredibly important.

Whether you are just starting your search for a Micro Focus OES backup or Novell OES backup vendor, or if your existing backup vendor is no longer supporting OES backups, Catalogic is an excellent and cost-effective alternative. We have been committed to our partnership with Micro Focus since the beginning, and we will continue to be there to protect your data for the long term.

If you would like to learn more about Catalogic DPX, 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.

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11/01/2021 0 Comments

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