August 31st, 2023

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. ↩