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.

The Alcion team has been busy over the last month! We've shipped a large number of improvements, big and small, in this time! Some of the highlights are below.

Features​

Simplified Protection Workflows​

This feature makes it easier for new Alcion users and, in particular, new trial users, to get started. You can now protect all your resources, existing and future, with a single click when you onboard your tenant. We hope it will make it extremely straightforward for you to test Alcion backing up all your resources at zero cost during the trial period.

Action Details​

We're constantly working to incorporate your feedback, and this is one of those items. Users wanted more visibility around completed backup and restore actions, and the capability is now available. As the above screenshot shows, Alcion displays a lot more information including times, durations, data statistics, and more!

Improvements​

The last month also included many smaller but important improvements to our platform:

• The version of Corso used by Alcion was upgraded. This brought in large performance improvements for backup and restore speeds and fixed bugs when handling large attachments.

• Backup scheduling was improved to further isolate "noisy" tenants from the rest of the system and improve your quality of service.

• For tenants with large number of users or sites, we also improved resource discovery. Alcion no longer blocks on full discovery but will instead iteratively display discovered resources.

Notable fixes​

We also had a few minor, but notable fixes, that went in:

• The restore API now includes complete statistics.
• UI improvements to increase the robustness of multi-resource selection.
• Fixed UI button sizing inconsistency as things being just slightly off bugs us as much it bugs you.
• Cleaned up failure semantics when backups fail (for example, when Microsoft has an outage in the middle of an ongoing backups).

Alcion Public Preview​

Welcome to the Alcion changelog and our first public update! We will be posting these monthly to provide visibility into newly released features, updates, and fixes.

First, a bit about us. Alcion offers AI-driven data protection for cloud services, with initial focus on Microsoft 365. We help companies with data management challenges including disaster recovery, ransomware and malware threats, and compliance.

For the last few months our team has been busy working closely with a handful of companies who were part of our Private Preview program. As part of this partnership, we collected feedback and relentlessly improved the ease of use and reliability of our service, while developing new capabilities. We've now reached the point where we're ready to open up Alcion to the world in Public Preview.

In this first update, we'll provide a summary of the primary capabilities of Alcion.

Quick and intuitive onboarding​

Our goal is to allow new customers to sign up for Alcion and start protecting their Microsoft 365 data in 10 minutes or less. We accomplish this by keeping the onboarding as intuitive as possible:

• Sign up with your Microsoft 365 account instead of creating yet another set of credentials
• Connect Alcion to your Microsoft 365 tenant and consent to the required permissions
• Specify your preferred timezone and data region

You are done! Alcion completes the rest of the setup and automatically discovers all available resources. You are ready to start your initial backups.

Support for Exchange, OneDrive, and Sharepoint​

At the start of Public Preview, Alcion provides support for the following Microsoft 365 services and data types:

• Exchange - emails, events, contacts
• OneDrive - user files
• Sharepoint - document library files

For more details, see the relevant documentation

Intelligent, recurring, and on-demand backups​

Simplicity when creating backups is a priority for Alcion. The following options are available:

• On-demand backups - Administrators can trigger backups as needed at any time.
• Recurring backups - Scheduled periodic backups that occur 3 times a day at set times.
• Intelligent backups - Alcion selects the most optimal times during the day, based on usage patters, to minimize data loss. For more details, see the relevant documentation.

For full automation, Alcion also allows selecting a policy that will be automatically applied when Alcion discovers new users. For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Ransomware protection and malware elimination​

At Alcion, we believe that improving the overall security posture of our customers is just as important as robust data protection. As a starting point, Alcion automatically filters out malware files from backups and analyzes your data for signs of ransomware activity. If suspicious activity is detected, Alcion tags as safe any backups that aren't affected and initiates pre-emptive backups.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.

Virtual backup immutability​

Backups are the best recourse when recovering from a cyber attack, and malicious actors frequently target backups early once they establish a foothold in your environment. In addition to keeping your backup data physically separated in different infrastructure, Alcion also ensures that backups can't be deleted if an Alcion admin account is compromised. Backup deletion requests are delayed by 14 days, giving you the opportunity to cancel any requests that haven't been legitimately authorized.

Browsing backups and powerful search​

To find the items that you are looking for, Alcion allows you to browse backups by backup time, data type, and data hierarchy.

Additionally, if you aren't sure where the items you may need are, you can search based on item or folder names across all backups.

Non-destructive, granular restores​

Alcion offers the ability to restore any combination of folders and items. To prevent unwanted accidental overwrites, Alcion restores data in a new folder named Alcion_Restore_<Timestamp> and preserves the original hierarchy.

For more details, see the relevant documentation

Recent activity and statistics​

In addition to ease of configuration, we also had a goal to make Alcion intuitive to operate. When you login, you get a single pane of glass summary of key stats - number of resources discovered and protected as well as status of recent backup and restore operations.

For each resource type and individual resources Alcion also displays the total logical size, count, and breakdown by type of all available and recent backup data. These statistics help understand the overall data at risk and velocity of change for each resource.

Data regions in the United States and Europe​

Alcion customers have a choice to store their backups in one of two supported locations - United States or Europe.

For more details, see the relevant documentation.