MSP360, a provider of simple and reliable backup and IT management solutions for MSPs and IT departments worldwide, has added immutable storage for AWS and more than a dozen other new features to MSP360 Managed Backup Service (MBS) to assist managed services providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams with protecting backups from the constantly evolving threat landscape.
“The latest updates to MSP360 MBS allow MSPs to further strengthen the IT infrastructures of their by delivering additional layers of data protection against malicious software, including ransomware,” said Brian Helwig, CEO of MSP360. “We’re not stagnant in our approach to providing MSPs with the tools they need to secure and protect customers backups from the rising threat of cybercriminals near and far.”
Designed with today’s MSP and IT teams in mind, MSP360 MBS enables MSPs and internal IT teams to leverage a range of robust cloud storage solutions — including AWS, Wasabi, Backblaze B2 and Microsoft Azure — for delivering best-in-class data protection while providing essential backup software features, such as centralized management, a bring-your-own-storage approach, flexible pricing, and 24/7/365 support.
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Delivering additional protections for MSPs and IT teams, the latest major product updates include the following:
- Immutable storage for AWS to protect against ransomware. Immutable storage prevents the accidental (or purposeful in some cases) deletion of data and ensures that an MSP can quickly recover customer data to the latest healthy backup after a ransomware attack occurs.
- New backup format. The new backup format works as follows: Every data set is kept as a separate entity. No matter what type of backup an MSP runs, every backup plan with its data set will be stored separately from all other backups. Thus, there’s no interference between the data from different backups and backup plans. This approach to data structuring allows MSP360 to introduce a bunch of useful features that will make backups run even faster — along with some other improvements.
- The Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention policy. GFS is a backup retention policy that’s based on keeping several full backup copies. These full backup sets have different retention routines: weekly, monthly, and yearly (where the grandfather is the oldest, yearly backup, the father is a monthly one, and the son is the youngest, weekly backup). Only a full backup that has been completed without any errors can become a GFS backup.
- Restore verification for image-based backups. Restore verification is a feature that allows MSPs to check the recoverability of system image backups. System image backup is a complete backup of everything on a PC or server, including operating system, installed applications, system settings, drivers, as well as files created or downloaded by users. When an MSP performs such a backup, MSP360 MBS creates a special file structure that can later be restored as a fully-fledged system on a virtual machine to test the backup for recoverability.
- Mandatory and full consistency checks. At the same step as restore verification, MSPs can enable another option: the consistency check. This feature helps MSPs check the state of data that’s backed up in customer storage and verify its consistency. Of course, an MSP usually sends undamaged files there, but there’s no 100 percent guarantee that these files won’t be corrupted while in transit or already in the cloud. Data corruption might happen, for example, because of technical problems on the server (since, although major storage providers have “11 nines” durability, that’s still not 100 percent) or some human factor.
- Client-side deduplication. Datasets that are uploaded during the process of backup can be huge, and transferring identical files located in different folders can be redundant and might take a lot of time. To reduce this time and bandwidth and storage consumption, MSP360 has implemented client-side deduplication in the new backup format.
- Synthetic full backup for file-level and VMware. Synthetic full backup is another feature that saves time and traffic, and now it’s available for file-level and VMware backups, along with image-based backups. After the first-generation full backup, only the changed data blocks get uploaded into the cloud, forming incremental backups. When a new full backup starts as scheduled, MSP360 MBS creates a new restore point based on the previous one. Synthetic full backup is enabled by default and works for the following cloud storage services: Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi.
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Additional new features include the following:
- Restore points. A restore point represents a set of backup data. If the restore point is valid, then all the data in the appropriate dataset is valid as well and can be recovered. All the restore points can be found on the Backup Storage tab of the MSP360 MBS Agent.
- Faster purge. As objects in the storage are saved as data parts, the purge speed is higher. Each time the purging mechanism works, it deletes a data part, not a single file.
- Faster synchronization. As there are fewer objects in the backup storage, the number of API requests is also reduced. Thus, the MSP pays less to its storage provider if these calls are not free.
- Plan configuration is always included in backups. This means an MSP doesn’t need to recreate its plans when using them on a new PC; the MSP can use the already-configured existing ones.
- Object size limits are higher. Object size limits are increased from 5 TB to 256 TB, regardless of storage provider limitations. This is achieved using data partitioning; no matter how big the object is, it’s divided and stored in smaller parts.
- Support for any filename characters and extra-long filenames. The MSP (and its users) no longer need to care about file names to back them up.
- Filename encryption out-of-the-box. One password for each backup generation. This feature could be used for compliance needs.
- Password hint. When an MSP uses encryption for its backups, there’s always a risk of forgetting the password. In this case, the MSP loses access to its data. Now an MSP can add a hint that will help it recall the password.
- Changed block tracking for image-based backups. With this update, it takes much less time to identify modified blocks of Image-based backups. Thus, consequent image-based backups run much faster.
“We’re constantly soliciting feedback from our customers, listening to their needs, and updating our solutions accordingly,” Helwig said. “That’s how we’ve been able to deliver a new flat-rate pricing structure for backups with MSP360’s MBS, powered by AWS, increase our customer base exponentially, and continue to expand our product line, ranging from backup to remote connect to RMM.”
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