March was another productive month for the Alcion team. Below is a summary of the new capabilities and improvements that are now available to current and future Alcion customers.

Features​

Group-based policy management - apply policy​

One of the most frequent requests for Alcion has been the ability to use Microsoft 365 groups (including Teams enabled groups) and Entra ID security groups as a selection mechanism to efficiently apply policies to users that are either direct or transitive members of a group.

The capability allows Alcion administrators to prioritize protection based on already existing business structures that are often captured by groups. For example, protecting the data of all finance department employees can be done by applying a backup policy to the Finance Teams or security group.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Configurable e-mail notification preferences​

Alcion now offers additional control over the categories of notifications that will be sent for an Alcion account. Additionally, administrators can also configure the email address where the notifications should be directed.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Included an indicator for the status of the latest attempted backup for each protected resource.
• Enabled identifying resources in suspended status through resource filtering.
• Simplified navigation from the Home page to relevant actions on the Activity page with direct links from elements of the Recent Activity chart.
• Added display of more accurate recent net resource discovery and status changes.
• Enhanced the Daily Activity notification emails to include resource net status changes.
• Improved the indication that the activity score on newly created may not yet be properly initialized.
• Made it possible to select all resources on a page or in search results to perform bulk actions.
• Improved reliability of initial resource discovery when permissions granted to Alcion are slow to propagate.
• Enabled navigation to failed actions directly from the resource pages.
• Introduced the ability to remove managed tenants from the Alcion Partner Portal without support assistance when an active subscription hasn't been established yet.
• Improved the user experience when an admin attempts to add to the Partner Portal a tenant that's already managed by a partner.
• Added mechanism for announcing system or maintenance outages.
• Improved backup performance for Exchange resources.
• Improved export performance by 6x.
• Improved backup resiliency when Exchange reports attachments as corrupt.
• Improved PST export resiliency for events with timezone values other than the ones documented by Microsoft here

Notable fixes​

• Fixed an error occurring in some cases when customers with direct subscriptions visit the partner portal.
• Fixed an issue with the View Related Activity action for site resources.
• Fixed accidental double submission for backup deletion requests.
• Fixed accidental double submission for backup policy changes.
• Fixed cases when export from backups might fail because of insufficient CPU allocation.
• Fixed an issue with incorrect pagination for filtering/searching for resource names containing reserved characters.
• Fixed an issue where the reason for suspending a resource wasn't properly shown in the UI.
• Fixed a problem where the recent number of completed backups on the Alcion Partner Portal may have been incorrect.
• Fixed improper discovery of distribution lists as group resources.
• Fixed errors when performing in-place restores which require replacing folders created for Teams channels.
• Fixed a problem where site group unique permissions on SharePoint document library folders weren't restored.
• Fixed cases where intermittent network failures could result in empty OneDrive or SharePoint restores.

Below is a summary of the great new capabilities and improvements that the Alcion team has introduced in March.

Features​

Backups completing with exceptions​

Alcion excels when it comes to the reliability and completeness of customer data backups, but on rare occasions backup of items may fail for reason external to Alcion. Some typical examples include, but aren't limited to, transient Microsoft API availability issues, corrupted or inaccessible items in the customer Microsoft 365 tenant, specific access restrictions, etc. The Alcion operations team actively investigates and remediates such failures but until now any error resulted in a failed backup, even if the vast majority of the data was successfully protected.

Alcion now allows backups with a small number of failures to complete with status Completed (with exceptions) and makes the data available for restores. The action details on the Activity page indicate which items were not backed up, and will be retried on subsequent attempts. The Alcion operations team continues to actively investigate and remediate such issues.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Partner delegated permissions management​

Alcion now offers additional control over the permissions granted when a managed tenant is added to the Alcion portal by a partner that manages the tenant. Additionally, the admins of the managed tenant will have visibility into the permissions that the partner has for delegated management.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Audit of backup policy updates​

In addition to providing visibility into data protection operations, the Activity page now also reflects policy configuration changes. This mechanism allows for effective auditing of who changed the protection settings and when the change was made.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Improved efficiency when updating backup policies on a large number of resources
• Reduced the retry interval for intermittent errors when initial resource discovery runs to improve the the overall user experience in such cases
• Introduced selecting a default backup data region based on the timezone of the user performing onboarding
• Added an indicator to show excluded and archived resources for a given resource type on the Alcion home page
• Marked initial backups with labels to indicate that they may take longer than subsequent backups
• Introduced indicators showing that there is a current backup in progress on the pages for a specific resource
• Added a Backup Now option on the pages for a specific resource
• Removed archived resources from the list of options when restoring to a different resource
• Allowed filtering Activity actions only to a single resource
• Disallowed duplicate sign-ups when a partner portal registration already exists. Additional users need to be invited.
• Adjusted visibility of tenant actions on the Alcion Partner portal based on the permissions granted by each managed tenant
• Added excluded resource counts to the Alcion Partner portal
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements

Notable fixes​

• Fixed an issue with the layout of the managed tenant breakdown on partner invoices
• Fixed an issue where backups couldn't complete for resources with multiple folders containing forward slashes
• Fixed incorrect status notification text when changing policies
• Fixed cases where successful re-drives initiated by the Alcion operations team weren't reflected on the original action
• Fixed an issue where a tenant with an existing subscription was incorrectly allowed to register for the Alcion Partner portal
• Fixed dark mode colors for the Alcion Partner portal
• Fixed cases where the subscription tier wasn't always properly reflected on partner managed accounts

February was an exciting month for us at Alcion. For the last few months, we've been working closely with a select group of Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners who were part of our Private Preview program to build an amazing experience for the rapidly increasing number of MSPs who are using Alcion to protect their customers. On February 13th, we unveiled Alcion for Partners to the world. I will cover some of the key capabilities below, but you can read more about the complete program details here.

Features​

Alcion for Partners​

The Alcion for Partners program combines MSP-friendly engagement processes and terms as well as new partner-specific functionality (see below) delivered through the Alcion partner portal.

Multi-tenant management​

The Alcion partner portal provides MSPs with a single dashboard for a consolidated operational view across all their managed customer accounts.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Delegated administration​

Alcion dramatically improves management efficiency and allows MPS admins, with the proper permissions, to switch between the multi-tenant context of the portal and the specific context of a customer tenant without the need to re-authenticate.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Self-service customer tenant onboarding​

MSPs can grow their business at their own pace and start managing new Alcion tenants for their customers without any involvement from Alcion’s sales, support, or operations teams.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Consolidated billing​

Finally, the Alcion partner portal allows MSP partners to manage a single subscription that automatically tracks license usage across all customer managed tenants.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Resource and Action Filtering​

We also haven't forgotten our non-partner users. One of the most common feature requests in recent weeks has been around additional controls when working with a large number of resources and actions. In response, Alcion now offers the ability to filter resources and actions on key fields such as backup policy, last backup date, activity level, etc.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Introduced a new login page for the Alcion partner portal.
• Added an option to enable automatic upgrades for annual plans when starting a subscription.
• Improved the performance of Alcion UI operations such as policy changes or initiating on-demand backups.
• Added an entry for Settings to the side navigation bar and made some visual style improvements.
• Enabled MSP admins to get a breakdown of their billable users by customer account on consolidated invoices.
• Force users to always chose an account when logging into Alcion, even if they're only logged into a single Microsoft 365 account.
• Enhanced the Alcion UI will indicate as Suspended resources which are temporarily excluded from backups.
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements. For more information on Corso specific changes please see the Corso changelog.

Notable fixes​

• Fixed a problem where resource discovery was reported as complete even when indexing was still incomplete.
• Fixed a visual issue where the dialog for ongoing resource discovery was preventing access to the user profile and settings controls.
• Fixed an issue when not all action menu entries were visible for entries close to the bottom of the screen on resource pages.
• Fixed the title of the Incidents column in the partner portal.
• Fixed scalability issues when using Set All Backups on a several thousand resources.
• Fixed an issue allowing an MSPs to incorrectly add the same tenant to multiple portal instances.

The Alcion team is off to a great start in 2024, and I'm happy to introduce the following new capabilities.

Features​

Manage Administrators​

It's not uncommon that more than one user needs access and permissions to administer Alcion. It's now possible for an Alcion user to invite additional administrators or, if needed, revoke access that has been previously granted.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Additional Email Notifications​

Alcion now offers additional notifications for events that may require your attention. The following new notifications are now available:

• First successful backup
• Export failures
• Export successful completions
• Backup deletion requests

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Contacts and Events PST Export​

Following the introduction of PST export for email last month, it's now also possible to export contacts and events as a PST file.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Improved performance when loading a large number of actions.
• Clarified error messages when attempting to start a backup and one is already in progress.
• Daily activity emails now include the number of days remaining in trial.
• Improved efficiency of ransomware detection by avoiding repeat analysis of items that haven't changed.
• Ensured that the full backup following a preview backup isn't subject to scheduling restrictions.
• Further optimized UI load times and responsiveness of actions.
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements. For more information on Corso specific changes please see the Corso changelog.

Notable fixes​

• Fixed improper handling of unlicensed teams.
• Fixed license discovery for users who have been removed in Microsoft 365.
• Fixed automatic inactive session logout on inactive browser tabs.
• Fixed an issue where excess licenses for annual subscriptions could be negative.
• Fixed the backup calendar selector which incorrectly allowed range selection.
• Fixed an issue where the full backup that follows preview backup might be subject to scheduling restrictions.
• Fixed incorrect reporting of malware and ransomware incidents in historical stats.

As 2023 draws to a close, the Alcion team is sending off the year in style with a great set of new capabilities and improvements.

Features​

Email PST Export​

One of our most requested features is finally here! It's now possible to export one or more emails and email folders as a PST file which can then be accessed through Outlook or another PST-compatible mail client.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Preview Backup​

Alcion is optimized for high-throughput when performing backups, but the first backup for a resource with a significant amount of data can take upwards of 30 minutes. This is normal and usually fine for a steady state deployment but can be really inconvenient when looking to quickly evaluate the full range of functional capabilities of any backup solution. To speed up their testing, we've seen users setup test environments or test resources with a limited amount of data. Such approaches work well, but do require a level of preliminary planning and extra work.

At Alcion, we greatly value the time of our users, which is why we introduced Preview Backups. During the first 5 days of a new trial, when the first backup for each resource type is requested, Alcion will create a partial, yet representative, backup of the resource. A Preview Backup typically completes in under 2 minutes, and a subsequent full backup automatically follows. Users don't have to wait and can use the Preview Backup like any other backup to evaluate the browse, search, restore, and export workflows.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Backup Calendar Selector​

For any resource enabled for backups, Alcion allows you to select and browse all previously created backups. As the number of backups for a resource grows, it becomes more challenging to navigate to the desired backup. To address this issue, we introduced a calendar-based backup browsing control.

Improvements​

• Improved the ability to trace when a previously failed backup has been followed by a subsequent successful operator initiated retry.
• Sped up loading of all key user interface pages.
• Introduced statistics in export action details.
• Added activity score for teams and groups resources.
• Enabled the ability to restore OneDrive files from shared mailbox backups that were created before the resource was converted to a shared mailbox.
• Disabled in-place and different location restore options which aren't applicable for archived resources.
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements. For more information on Corso specific changes please see the Corso changelog.

Notable fixes​

• Fixed incorrect protected user count when the number is below the minimum licenses required for a tenant.
• Fixed cases of incorrect negative compliance score.
• Fixed inconsistencies with how In Progress backup actions are counted in the recent and full activity panels.
• Fixed cases where paging controls were shown even when no additional pages are available.
• Fixed missing sign out button on mobile devices.
• Fixed an issue where the trial expiration notification wasn't always visible.

The Alcion team continues to make improvements to our platform, and November was another productive month. Below is a summary of some of the new capabilities and improvements that our team introduced.

Features​

Partner Portal Private Preview​

At Alcion, we're already working closely with Manager Service Providers and Partners who use Alcion to protect the Microsoft 365 data for their own clients. While Alcion makes managing each account a breeze, we've started adding capabilities that allow partners to monitor and manage multiple accounts at scale through the Alcion Partner Portal.

This offering is still in Private Preview and is only available to a handful of partners who are already providing great feedback to our team. If you are interested in joining the Private Preview program, please send us a request at info@alcion.ai.

Resource classification alignment​

Based on feedback, we've adjusted some of the classification rules that Alcion uses to determine the types of different resources. The changes are favorable when it comes to Alcion licensing and will generally result in fewer resources classified as billable users. Some of the key changes are:

• Resources designated in Exchange as Shared Mailbox are no longer classified as Users if they have an active OneDrive.
• Users without any assigned licenses will no longer be discovered by Alcion or if already discovered will be converted to Archived resources.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Automatic annual plan upgrade​

Given the popularity of our annual plans, Alcion administrators now have the option to automatically upgrade their subscriptions when the number of billable users exceeds the number of annual protected users they have purchased. This allows administrators to always take advantage of our lower annual rates.

If the option is enabled, each month, Alcion will add the required annual users to your subscription and will charge you a pro-rated amount for the remainder of the annual billing period.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Added the ability to upgrade the type plan for annual subscriptions.
• Implemented blocking of multiple sign-ups from the same M365 domain to prevent accidental account duplication.
• Added a link to navigate to the restore destination for OneDrive and SharePoint restore actions.
• Enhanced the Quickstart option to start up to 4 of the scheduled backups it enables immediately.
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements. For more information on Corso specific changes please see the Corso changelog.

Notable fixes​

• Fixed an issue where backups couldn't be found when navigating to a specific backup from the activity page.
• Fixed an issue allowing an unsupported restore of multiple document libraries.
• Fixed cases where notification emails are accidentally sent multiple times.

As our team wraps up a great October, I wanted to summarize the new capabilities and improvements that we introduced in Alcion over the last month.

Features​

Microsoft teams​

Support for Microsoft teams is here! Alcion discovers all your Teams and Groups.

In terms of supported data types, Alcion can backup messages in any standard, private, or shared Teams channel as well as files in the document libraries of the related SharePoint sites.

SharePoint sites are still discovered and protected as separate resources, but the system also tracks the relationships between a Team or a Group and any associated sites. For convenience, the UI exposes the ability to navigate between these related resources.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Monthly annual subscription usage report​

To make it easier for Alcion administrators to track the current number of protected users against their annual subscription, Alcion proactively sends a billing report before each intermediate monthly billing period. Administrators can use the information to modify their subscription or usage based on their business continuity, compliance, and budget goals.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Provisioning a new Alcion account now takes a minute or less. No more waiting to get started!
• Single file exports are no longer a ZIP file and retain the original item name by default.
• Notifications include the domain associated with a given Alcion account.
• Notification preferences can be controlled from a link in each notification email.
• Self-service upgrade for annual subscriptions. No more need to contact support when you want to increase the number of your annual licenses.
• Clear indication of the current protected users against your annual subscription, including estimated charges for on-demand excess protected users on the subscription page.
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements. For more information on Corso specific changes please see the Corso changelog.

Notable fixes​

• Fixed an incorrect resource type displayed when setting up default policy for newly discovered resources.
• Fixed cases where the resource discovery dialog is incorrectly dismissed before completing discovery.
• Fixed Activity Insights that weren't properly reported when a Microsoft 365 tenant has turned off anonymized data for usage reports.
• Fixed the ability to restore Shared Mailbox items to another resource, including a user.

Features​

Welcome to another installment of our monthly changelog! On behalf of the Alcion team, I'm happy to share with you the new capabilities and improvements that we've made generally available over the month of September.

File export from backups​

One of the most common feature requests since our Public Preview launch has been the ability to export data from backups locally as opposed to restoring it back to the original Microsoft 365 environment. Alcion now offers this capability for OneDrive and SharePoint files.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Ransomware and malware detection insights​

Alcion now provides administrators with additional transparency into ransomware detection functionality, resulting in additional peace of mind that their data is protected against cyber attacks.

At a resource level, Alcion exposes the training progression for a given resource and the level of confidence that the anomaly model can achieve. The model can provide reliable predictions after 30 days of backup observations and reaches full strength after 90 days.

Additionally, administrators have access to account-level historical stats about the number of ransomware and malware threats detected.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Self-service annual billing​

Building on our previous release of self-service month-to-month billing, Alcion customers no longer need to work with our support team when they want to take advantage of our discounted rates on annual subscriptions. Alcion now allows you to start an annual subscription completely independently.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Simplified self-service billing with filtering applicable VAT/GST ID based on the customer billing address.
• Ransomware detection model improvements for cases where the activity involves unrecognized file types.
• Allow restores to succeed with a warning in cases where file permissions can't be restored because the user account no longer exists.
• Improved the reliability and efficiency of the Alcion backup scheduling.
• Upgraded to the latest version of Corso which brings a number of functional, performance, and robustness improvements. For more information on Corso specific changes please see the Corso changelog.

Notable fixes​

• Removed Microsoft Bookings pages which were incorrectly discovered as users.
• Fixed incorrect reporting of SharePoint site name when excluding sites from backups.
• Made account settings menu accessible on smaller width devices.
• Fixed attempts to retrieve subscription information before the Alcion account is properly initialized.
• Fixed errors when bulk applying policy changes to too many resources causes the request payload to become too large.

Our team has had a productive August, and we're happy to announce a number of improvements to our platform that are now generally available for use.

Features​

Enhanced ransomware detection​

Protection in the event of cyber attacks remains a top priority for us, and we continuously improve Alcion's ability to recognize threats. Our ransomware detection model now considers an even broader set of access metrics, item metadata, and item contents when monitoring for anomalies over an even longer time horizon (now past 90 days).

Alcion now uses a family of unsupervised anomaly detection models that improve accuracy and can recognize not only fast moving mass encryption events but also more sophisticated attacks that employ partial encryption over longer periods.

Stay tuned for much more on this topic that our amazing engineers will share in the future.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Ransomware & malware email alerts​

Alcion now offers additional email notifications to keep you informed about cyber related incidents that require your immediate attention. The newly supported notification types are:

• Potential ransomware activity detected
• Malware found and eliminated

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Shared mailboxes​

Alcion now supports protecting shared mailboxes. In the past, shared mailboxes may have been discovered as regular users, but they're now a first class citizen in the Alcion user experience. Separating users and shared mailboxes as a different resource type also brings more clarity for license management since shared mailboxes don't require a separate license¹.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Resource activity insights​

In addition to the visibility it can provide into backup data, Alcion also helps you understand the high-level dynamics of data activity for the underlying Microsoft 365 resources even when these resources are not protected by Alcion.

This makes it much easier to identify resources where the underlying data is changing at a rapid pace. Such resources are at higher risk of data loss and will be great candidates to protect with a recurring or intelligent backup policy.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Compliance score​

To provide a clear way to understand the current level of protection, Alcion calculates a compliance score for each supported resource type. The score indicates that a protection policy is assigned to resources and that there has been at least 1 successful backup in the last 24 hours.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Self-service billing and licensing​

Up until this point, Alcion customers had to work with our support team to procure their subscription. We recognize that this deprives prospects of the ability to make this important decision at their own pace. To improve this experience, Alcion now allows you to select your desired plan and pay for it in a self-service manner.

To ensure the utmost security (Alcion never stores payment information) and flexibility of available payment methods, the payment experience is powered by Stripe.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Upgraded the version of Corso used by Alcion.
• Improved ordering for triggering pre-emptive backups when a ransomware attack is detected to maximize protection.
• More intuitive set of backup policies to control enabling or disabling of backups.

Notable fixes​

• Fixes consistent formatting for all stats using proper locale formatting.
• Fixes error where backups would not automatically start when bulk setting policy on multiple resources.
• Fix some spacing issues for modal dialogues.
• Fix how the correct automatic policy is selected when changing between Alcion subscription tiers.

Footnotes​

1. Shared mailboxes that have an active OneDrive associated with the account will be considered a User. ↩

The Alcion team continues to make improvements to our platform. Below are highlights for some of the work that has been baking for a little while and is now generally available for use.

Features​

Additional restore options​

One of the most requested improvements to Alcion has been the ability to control how data is restored. This has now been addressed! In addition to the default non-destructive restore to a new location, Alcion now supports restoring to the original backup location (including conflict resolution) and restoring to a different user or site.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Email notifications​

Alcion already offers great visibility into the operational health of your data protection and security through our home dashboard and activity pages when you are in the product. Email notification are now available in Alcion to keep you informed of key events that require attention. The initially supported notifications are:

• Backup failures
• Daily backup activity summary
• Restore failures
• Restore successful completions
• Suspected ransomware activity

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

New Asia Pacific data region​

Alcion customers can now store their backups in Asia Pacific (Australia) in addition to the existing United States and Europe regions.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Improvements​

• Upgraded the version of Corso used by Alcion.
• Improved Alcion login page.
• Action details now include a record of the restore options used.
• Backups other than the latest are highlighted with an inline call-out for better user visibility.
• Improved how automated action re-drives in response to failures are displayed in the Activity view.
• Recent statistics for the last 24 hours are now properly aligned with the Alcion account timezone.

Notable fixes​

• Hardened resource discovery when there are gaps in the permissions granted to Alcion for the Microsoft 365 tenant.
• Resource discovery no longer requires at least one user with a valid OneDrive license.
• Addressed some possible inconsistencies between action stats and summary stats.