Here at Cyberfort, we’re thrilled to announce a brand new Veeam Cloud Connect platform. With many beneficial new features available such as immutability, and a brand-new customer portal enabling you to better manage your service with us.  All existing Cyberfort VCC customers will be moved over to our new Cyberfort CBS service over the coming months, and we’re here to support your switchover to ensure this goes as seamless as possible.  Make sure to click the link at the end of this email where you can find answers to questions you may have.

• Object Storage (coming Q3 2023).  Object storage is the preferred repository type for Veeam M365 backup, and can be added to a block repository (performance tier) to add a capacity tier, for when you have a very large amount of VM backup data and/or want long retention for backup archives.  Veeam v12 also supports object storage as a primary backup target, with an example use case of having hundreds of laptops backing up to our S3 storage from any location, but all controlled via your Cyberfort CBS portal.

• Optimised platform for larger backup requirements, with a better design for scalability.   We have worked with Veeam to ensure the platform is built with all best practices for the Veeam v12 platform and beyond, with a far higher capacity for incoming data streams and compute resources for fast and efficient processing of traffic.

Customer Portal

• A brand new customer portal is available with Cyberfort CBS.  This enables a multitude of new features that you can login and configure yourself.  Secured with multi-factor authentication and the ability to link to your own single-sign-on provider, you can check on all of your Veeam estate from a single view

• Create custom reports based on your SLAs or RPOs

• Be informed if any of your software has an upgrade or patch available

• Manage backup agents, including having a master agent in your environment that pushes agent installs to other machines on your network

• Assign users or admins with the ability to Restore M365 items

• Configure alarms to trigger against backup jobs or infrastructure elements, and optionally send emails

• Manage subtenant user accounts and resources to split your Cyberfort CBS repositories in to separate entities with unique backup authentication details.

• Full guide to the features of VSP

Got a question? Read on…

How will customers using the current Veeam Cloud Connect transition over to our new Veeam platform – Cyberfort CBS?

The easiest and most optimal way to switch over will be to add our new service to your Veeam product and create new backup/backup copy jobs using your new repository in Cyberfort CBS.  This will ensure you start with a fresh backup chain that uses the new v12 metadata model, and avoids any gap in your backups.

What happens to existing backups on the older platform?

Your access to the older platform will remain until the end of June 2023.  Once you are successfully sending your backup jobs to Cyberfort CBS, you should disable your older backup jobs.  If you have archive backup data you wish to keep from the older platform, we can arrange for that to be moved over to your new repository during the transition period.

Can I choose not to move to the new Cyberfort CBS platform?

We do need all of our current customers to switch to Cyberfort CBS before the end of June 2023.  Partly because the existing storage equipment is approaching end-of-life, but also the huge changes to the Veeam Cloud Connect technology since our original backup platform went live 10 years ago means we can only bring all of the new features and optimisations to our customers with a full re-design from the ground up.  We hope to make the transition as painless as possible for you, and hope you enjoy the added benefits of the new platform.

What connection settings will be different with Cyberfort CBS compared to the current backup service?

The connection DNS name will be new, with new internet IP addresses.  You will receive a new username and password for the new connection, and be invited to create an admin user account for the new VSPC portal if you wish to use that.  To fully utilise the portal you can tick the box in the service provider connection settings on your Veeam backup & replication server to enable management from the portal.

Is the new VSPC portal secure?

All access to the VSPC portal will have multi-factor authentication enforced by default for local accounts, and you can optionally link a single-sign-on authentication provider (such as Azure/M365).  We have also run rigorous penetration tests against the endpoints with our own partner security company and will continue to do so through the lifetime of the product.

What is the immutable backup feature exactly, and how does it affect my backup/backup copy jobs?

Immutability has become a necessary protection feature for backups.  Once a daily backup has completed successfully to the Cyberfort CBS repository, all backup files in the chain are marked with a special immutability flag with an associated date.  These files then cannot be deleted by Veeam or even by system administrators at Cyberfort from the repository file system, ensuring your backups are safe even if a bad actor gained full control of your Veeam backup server.  Because the entire backup chain (full + incrementals) is protected, the backup or backup copy job must include  a regular synthetic or full backup (we would recommend a weekly synthetic) in order for older chains to reach their immutability expiry and allow the chain to be deleted.

Will immutability require a larger repository than before?

In cases where existing backup copy jobs have used the forever-incremental mode of Veeam backup without ever triggering synthetic-full backups or having any GFS archives, it is possible you will use slightly more repository space than before.  For our customers migrating to Cyberfort CBS in this situation, we will modify your repository quota accordingly to accommodate at least a weekly synthetic-full backup at no extra cost.  Please let us know if you believe you will be affected by this so we can understand what changes we need to make.

Are there any changes to backup encryption requirements?

On our current Ash VCC platform customers have been able to setup unencrypted backup copy jobs to our storage repositories, however this will not be possible on Cyberfort CBS.  Customers were usually unaware of how to enable encryption or simply missed that option and unintentionally allowed their backup copies to stored unencrypted.  On Cyberfort CBS encryption will now be mandatory, and you will be prompted to enable encryption if you forget to select that option.  Instructions on how to enable encryption will be supplied in our how-to transition guide.  Please be aware that only you as the customer will know your encryption password, so it is imperative you keep this safely recorded and do not rely on the Veeam server remembering it for you.

Does Cyberfort CBS have WAN accelerators available?

After discussions with Veeam, they have confirmed to us that the WAN accelerator feature in Veeam has become almost redundant due to the fact base internet links are much faster.  By enabling the WAN accelerator feature to any Veeam Cloud Connect service means limiting the connection to a single stream, and this combined with the processing and space overhead of the feature results in a slower transfer and more administrative effort.  So we have not made WAN accelerators available by default, however we recognise there might be fringe environments that would still benefit from WAN acceleration due to bandwidth limitations, so please talk to us if you believe this change might affect you.

When is scheduled maintenance on the Cyberfort CBS platform?

We will continue to apply patches and upgrades to our backup platform between the hours of 14:00 and 16:00 on Mondays if they are required.  We strongly advise that any backup/backup copy jobs mark the hours of 12:00 – 18:00 every Monday as disabled in the transfer schedule window.  This is to allow for running jobs to cleanly complete the current file transfers, and to allow for any overage of maintenance that might occur due to unexpected issues.

I have to update our firewall rules to allow our Veeam products to communicate to the new Cyberfort CBS IP addresses, how long do we have to transition away from the current platform?

We would prefer that our customers transition over to Cyberfort CBS as quickly as possible after receiving the guide and account details from us but understand some companies need to work with other departments in order to open up firewalls to accommodate the change.  We hope the deadline of 30^th June 2023 will be long enough to complete the changes necessary.