March 31st, 2024

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