February 29th, 2024

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.