Spanning Updates

November 22, 2024
Backup for Google Workspace

Archive Licenses for Google Workspace

Spanning’s latest feature, Archived Licenses, enables Google Workspace customers to retain business-critical data of inactive and deactivated accounts optimally and cost-effectively. This feature ensures essential information remains accessible without overpaying for licenses. It preserves only the data that was previously backed up from inactive and deactivated accounts, helping organizations meet data retention mandates without incurring the costs of full-featured licensing by Google or by Spanning Backup.

Spanning’s Archived Licenses for Google Workspace enables significant savings on SaaS data retention costs for businesses. When an organization converts an active license to an archived one, it frees up that active license for a new user, which is particularly beneficial in transitional periods.

November 01, 2024
Backup for Salesforce

Spanning for Salesforce: Disable Triggers Workflows and Rules Upon Restore

Spanning Backup for Salesforce now allows you to disable triggers, workflows and rules during restores. The new feature accelerates the restore process and ensures data integrity by preventing potential errors caused by conflicting automation. This optional, user-enabled functionality optimizes Salesforce data recovery, saving you time and enhancing user confidence in the restore process.

The ability to temporarily disable triggers, workflows and rules during restores not only ensures greater speed but also eliminates the errors and complexities caused by unintended automation. It empowers IT teams to handle even the most challenging restores with precision and confidence.

October 28, 2024

Kaseya 365 User: Prevent, Respond to and Recover From User-Based Attacks

Kaseya 365 User is built on five essential components, each aligned with a Kaseya module to support the three core pillars of cybersecurity: prevention, response and recovery. Kaseya 365 User is a revolutionary user security subscription strategically developed to maximize security and efficiency while minimizing costs. Kaseya 365 User offers a holistic, integrated approach to user protection, tackling today’s most pressing cyber-risks with advanced, proactive solutions.

Kaseya 365 User gives you access to essential tools to prevent, respond to and recover from user-targeted threats — all within a single subscription.

September 27, 2024
Backup for Google Workspace

Spanning Backup for Google Workspace: Automated License Assignment

Spanning’s Automated License Assignment feature simplifies the process of managing backup licenses across different departments, locations or groups. With this new feature, Spanning Backup allows admins to automatically assign backup licenses to users based on their Google OUs or Groups memberships. This automation drastically reduces the manual workload during onboarding and throughout the user lifecycle management, ensuring that every new user or employee is backed up from day one.

Figure 1. Configure automated license assignment from Spanning Settings.

August 06, 2024
Backup for Salesforce

Spanning Backup for Salesforce: Point-in-Time Restore and Export

Spanning’s point-in-time restore and export feature for Salesforce significantly improves the user experience and usability of the product by simplifying data restoration and export scenarios.

This feature provides backup snapshots, allowing users to easily navigate point-in-time backups for restoration and export purposes. It expands upon existing Search and Upload ID List options for selecting Objects to recover by adding a “Browse” functionality, similar to how Spanning displays Microsoft and Google backups.

With this functionality, you can easily access the state of your Salesforce environment at specific points in time across your various backups. You can run restores or exports based on Object Type, including granular selections. For example, you might choose to export a subset of Accounts rather than all Accounts from a given point in time.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to view and export your point-in-time backups in Spanning:

Step 1: From the Restore or Export tab, select the Browse option to view your point-in-time backups.

Step 2: Easily browse and select your snapshot from the dropdown menu.

Step 3: Select object type. You can restore all objects or select granular objects. Use Preview to view object details, such as Fields.

Step 4: Select restore settings.

December 22, 2023
Backup for Microsoft 365

Option to Disable Self-Service for Microsoft 365 With Spanning

Self-service allows end users to restore or export their data as needed without the need for Spanning or Microsoft Global administrator assistance. This feature is great for saving time and reducing the burden on IT admins. However, it can also increase the risk of data loss or exposure due to employee negligence or misuse of privileges.

To give you greater control over your data, Spanning offers the option to disable self-service restore/export for Microsoft 365. This feature gives your organization the flexibility to decide whether or not you want end-user access or end-user export. By disabling self-service, your organization can minimize the risk of data loss associated with end-user export to a great extent.

Figure 1. Option to disable self-service for Microsoft 365

October 03, 2023
Backup for Microsoft 365

Restore and Export Progress Bar

The new Restore and Export Progress Bar feature, an improvement to Microsoft 365 restore and export reporting capabilities, provides a detailed progress status bar in the Spanning dashboard. This puts Spanning admins in a position to accurately find out how the restore and export operations are progressing (see Figure 1). No more guessing games — just clear, concise information at your fingertips.

Figure 1. The current restore operation status, along with the progress stage in percentage, is shown in the dashboard.

The new feature highlights an item column that shares the total number of items selected for restore. Additional information, such as how many items were processed and how many items are left to be processed, can also be received with the help of this update (see Figure 2). All these are critical to understanding the time left for the restore or export to finish. Ultimately, this feature helps in meeting recovery time objectives (RTOs) and increased user expectations.

Figure 2. A detailed view of the dashboard.

October 01, 2023
Backup for Salesforce

Spanning Backup for Salesforce Expands to the UK, Canada and Australia

Due to regulatory requirements, backups often need to stay in-region. Spanning Backup for Salesforce helps you stay compliant with three more data centers — in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Your data never leaves the region you operate in, ensuring compliance with regulations.

July 31, 2023
Backup for Microsoft 365

Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365: Protection for SharePoint Online Lists

Spanning can now back up SharePoint Online list data along with our existing support for Mail, Calendars, Contacts, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint libraries.

Leveraging Microsoft 365 APIs, Spanning provides granular backup and recovery solutions to SharePoint Online list data.

With this feature, the SharePoint lists are automatically backed up once a day, enabling you to protect and restore SharePoint list data, including columns, rows, fields and metadata, effortlessly​. Backups, including user metadata (with full support for SharePoint Online Managed Metadata) and workflows, ensure all your data is adequately secured and can be recovered at once when needed. Even if someone accidentally edits the SharePoint list, you’ll still be able to see the full data in our inventory list — thanks to our granular recovery of each item from the list.

Figure 1. A typical view of a list in SharePoint Online.

July 26, 2023
Backup for Microsoft 365

Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365: Archived User Licensing

Microsoft 365 Licenses are EXPENSIVE. Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365 allows you to protect and preserve the data of deleted users on more flexible terms.

When a user being actively protected by a Spanning Backup Standard License is deleted from your Microsoft 365 tenant, Spanning assigns the user an archived license automatically (if available), which is cheaper than the standard license. When an archived license is assigned, new backups will not run for that particular user. Any backup data collected prior to the assignment of the archived license or the deletion of the user in Microsoft 365 (whichever comes first) can be restored to another user, mailboxes or exported. However, if no archived license is available, the deleted user will continue to be protected on standard license terms. Spanning’s archived user licenses provide organizations with a cost-effective way to retain previously backed-up data for future restoration or export.​

July 03, 2023
Backup for Google Workspace

Spanning for Google Workspace: Advanced Backup Flow for Shared Drives

Spanning’s Advanced Shared Drives Backup Flow significantly improves overall backup speed and onboarding. With the new enhancements, Shared Drive backups are separated from user drive backups, both from the UI side and the backend. They are queued separately from user drive backups, reducing latency while enabling faster data transfer rates and quicker backups. Additionally, you have the option to toggle specific Shared Drive backups on or off. Self-service restoration for Shared Drives is also available, reducing the burden on the IT team.

April 07, 2023
Backup for Microsoft 365

Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365 Now Allows You to Protect and Preserve Deleted User Data on More Flexible Terms

A Microsoft 365 E5 License can cost up to $57. The last thing you want to do is spend that money just to hold onto some old user data. With Spanning Backup’s Archived Licenses, you can now hold onto that data without paying double for licenses associated with deleted Microsoft 365 users.

If a user remains licensed in Spanning, we will hold onto that data according to your organization’s retention policies, regardless of their status in Microsoft 365. Doing so will free up the Microsoft 365 license for a new user joining the organization. Also, Spanning Backup Archived Licenses come at a lower price than standard licenses.

We Live in a World of Constant Change, but Backup Remains Essential

Many organizations are required to hold onto data for compliance purposes, sometimes for up to 11 years or more, depending on the applicable regulations. Considering that many organizations can experience roughly 18% turnover in their workforce, it becomes apparent how much of a challenge onboarding, offboarding, archiving and deleting user data can become.

All kinds of issues can lead to data loss, but the last thing you want to deal with is the unfortunate discovery that you forgot to “turn on the backup.” Spanning Backup provides the ability to automatically and intelligently assign backup protection to users via AD groups, and we can also detect when a user has been deleted from Microsoft 365. Based on your preferences, these users can be swapped to new archived licenses — ad-hoc, in bulk or automatically.

Here are a few additional details about Archived Licenses:

  • Archived User Licenses are independent and unique from Standard Backup User Licenses. These licenses are tracked and purchased separately.
  • When an archived license is applied, the standard license becomes available for application to another user.
  • Standard licenses cannot be “converted” in the product UI. Please contact your account manager for more information if you have a significant volume of deactivated users to manage.
  • You can still restore data from an archived user to another user’s mailbox, OneDrive, calendar, contacts list, or Microsoft Teams and SharePoint libraries.
April 01, 2023
Backup for Salesforce

Where Is That Account?

During a data loss incident, the last thing you want is to waste time searching through your backups. It might be unclear which backup batch the last good version of a record or field was in. Now with Spanning Backup for Salesforce, you can use the modified time as an additional search filter and specify granular time ranges when searching through large backup batches.

Upgrades Where They Count

Spanning is upgrading its search technology by leveraging the latest improvements from the Amazon Web Services platform. Over the coming months, we will be rolling out improved recovery search performance for all customers. There is no additional cost for this improvement, and it will be made available to all customers with a Spanning Backup for Salesforce subscription.

March 01, 2023

Spanning Backup Now Powered by BackupIQ!

All Spanning Backup customers, regardless of whether they use UniView or VSA, can now connect to BackupIQ, our free intelligence engine, available via UniView.

New to UniView? It’s free! Contact your Account Manager to get started. For details on using BackupIQ alerts, see “Working With Your BackupIQ Integration” in the Spanning Backup Guide. You’ll gain access to all kinds of killer new features and integrations, such as conditional alerts or alarms, email alerts, intelligent ticketing and protected workloads status tracker.

Figure 1: Conditional alerts in UniView

Configure conditional alerts/alarms that will trigger when a workload’s RPO falls outside of a desired threshold

Thresholds can be defined globally or granularly at an organization level. This is very valuable if you have different RPO targets and expectations across your organizations and customers.

Alarms for Spanning, appliances, replication, protected assets and more will all be consolidated into a single area for quick and easy triage.

Figure 2: Steps to configure conditional alerts or alarms

Subscribe to receive email alerts

When conditional alarms are triggered, email alerts can be generated in addition to adding entries into the Unitrends alert tray. An example of an email alert is shown below.

Figure 3: Email alert

Intelligent ticketing integration with PSA systems

If you use a PSA system, like BMS or Autotask for example, for your technicians’ day-to-day work, then you’ll love this update. Spanning Backup can now intelligently open tickets when a workload’s RPO falls outside of your desired threshold and automatically resolve tickets if a system completes a successful backup and falls back into compliance.

Status of all your protected workloads in one place

Stop having to remember multiple logins or wasting time tracking down the status of your important resources. View all your backup and storage information, from Microsoft 365 to file shares, in a single, easy-to-consume dashboard.

Figure 4: UniView Dashboard

All these features are focused on ensuring you are aware when systems are in trouble and are not chasing false positives or wasting technician time. This gives you more confidence in your backups and ensures your most talented resources are focused on adding value to the organization rather than troubleshooting backup problems or struggling to identify which systems need troubleshooting.

March 01, 2023
Backup for Google Workspace

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

If you’ve been a Google Workspace partner, reseller or MSP for a few years, you’re probably highly familiar with our legacy reseller console. For those who aren’t, it looks like this:

We will be retiring this legacy console on June 30, 2023. Now that doesn’t mean we’re taking away that critical reseller and multidomain management capability you rely on. In fact, we’re making it better and FREE!

A Fresh New Look

If you’re managing multiple Google Workspace domains or are operating as a global reseller, you may be wondering how to easily service and manage clients all over the world. We’ve got you covered with UniView. You can now manage all your clients across all Spanning products and data center regions from one place.

This new and updated experience includes a modern UI as well as the ability to:

  • Manage all Spanning products through a single console (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce).
  • Easily self-service additional licenses.
  • Easily transfer licenses between managed domains.
  • Manage domains in multiple data center regions in a single console.
  • Gain access to additional backup modules for endpoint protection — appliance, virtual or Azure backup.
  • Gain access to a suite of solutions part of the KaseyaOne IT Complete family.
  • Manage your customers, support tickets and account information from a single console.

For more information on this release, check out our KB article here: https://helpdesk.kaseya.com/hc/en-gb/articles/12691694646929-Spanning-Backup-for-Google-Workspace-Legacy-Reseller-Console-End-of-Life

February 01, 2023
Backup for Microsoft 365

Upgrade Your Automated Protection Today

Organizations grow and transform regularly. It can be frustrating to discover that several newly onboarded users were never assigned backup licenses or that your technicians may lose a significant amount of time simply purchasing, assigning and managing backup licenses.

In a previous update, we added the ability to check for newly added users and automatically enable protection for them based on Active Directory Group membership using the Azure AD assignment feature.

When combined with automatic purchasing, we will intelligently assign licenses based on membership and acquire licenses if the pool is empty. This will significantly reduce the time technicians lose just purchasing, assigning and managing backup licenses.

December 01, 2022
Backup for Salesforce

Full Object Recovery With Spanning Backup for Salesforce

While it’s most common for Salesforce administrators to perform granular record recovery, there are times when all records in an organization of a particular Salesforce record type need to be restored or exported. For these scenarios, we have updated our restore interface to allow you to select an entire object type and perform recovery of all records of that type.

As you can see in the example above, we are now able to search for all records of the “Account” object type rather than searching by a specific Salesforce ID or Record Name/Value.

More Discovery Options

In the past, users were only able to search for records that were newly created or updated between a specific point in time. If an unchanged record was needed for export or restore, it was only possible via a CSV upload or by providing the exact Salesforce ID.

However, that is no longer the case. Now you can browse for all records, even those that were unchanged, that appear in backup between the times you specify in the search filters.

For more information on these new capabilities, check out our knowledge base article here: https://helpdesk.kaseya.com/hc/en-gb/articles/11460563387153-Enhanced-Disaster-Recovery-support-with-backup-data-browsing-in-Spanning-for-Salesforce

November 01, 2022
Backup for Google Workspace

Don’t Run Out of Licenses and Don’t Waste Time

Organizations grow and transform regularly. It can be frustrating to discover that several newly onboarded users were never assigned backup licenses or that your technicians may lose a significant amount of time simply purchasing, assigning and managing backup licenses. Now with Spanning Backup for Google Workspace, you can opt-in to automatically purchase additional licenses to meet the needs of your growing organization. Just set it and forget it. Once a day, Spanning will check for newly added users and automatically enable protection if the setting is enabled.

If combined with automatic purchase, we will automatically acquire an additional license and assign it.

All it takes is one click, and you never have to worry about buying licenses again.

September 01, 2022
Backup for Microsoft 365

Don’t Go Unprotected

The last thing you want to tell your boss is that you forgot to turn on the backups when a data loss incident occurs. The onboarding and offboarding process at many organizations can be complicated, at times taking up to 54 steps. This complexity can sometimes lead to issues with provisioning, documentation and more. Don’t let this be why someone’s Microsoft 365 protection wasn’t enabled.

Azure AD Sync Makes It Easy

Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365 provides capabilities to automatically protect new users in your tenant via Azure Active Directory group membership.

Once you have selected which Azure AD security groups should be protected, Spanning will check daily for new members and automatically assign an available backup license to this user to enable protection. Combined with automated purchasing, this is a powerful tool that can ensure you never go unprotected.

For more information on how to use Azure AD based licensing, check out our knowledge base article here: https://helpdesk.kaseya.com/hc/en-gb/articles/8718659501969-Spanning-Microsoft-365-Group-Based-licensing

June 01, 2022
Backup for Google Workspace

Global Data Center Update

Spanning Backup for Google Workspace is getting a global data center update. To meet massive global demand, we are proud to announce data center availability in the UK, Canada and Australia. This will allow our clients and partners to get the best performance and ensure data sovereignty at the same time.

For more information on Spanning’s global data centers, check out our page: https://spanning.com/spanning-global-data-centers/

SFDC-032022
March 01, 2022
Backup for Salesforce

Have more control with your Salesforce data with Spanning’s API

Customers now have access to Spanning’s API which will enable them to run on-demand backups out of Salesforce and compare their current data against what their backup contains. As well as build custom reports for those who have multiple orgs being backed up and there is a need to see centralized status across all orgs.

GWS-022022
February 01, 2022
Backup for Google Workspace

User interface improvements and what’s new link

Customers can now enjoy improvements in our main menu and now have a What’s New link which takes them to a repository of features and improvements to Spanning. Every time there is a new feature or improvement released to Spanning, the What’s New page will be updated.

M365-022022
February 01, 2022
Backup for Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 Data Center Expansion — UK Data Center

Our global data center options are growing! In addition to our Canadian AWS data center that we set up in October, Spanning’s data protection services will be available through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) regional data center in London, starting February 2022. You can now maintain data sovereignty and compliance with our AWS UK data center for all your Microsoft 365 data. Our all-new AWS UK data center demonstrates Spanning’s commitment to UK customer privacy, allowing new customers to store their backup data entirely within the UK.

For more information on Spanning’s global data centers, check out our page: https://spanning.com/spanning-global-data-centers/

M365-012022.1
January 01, 2022
Backup for Microsoft 365

Spanning storage reporting in Kaseya VSA and Unitrends UniView

Now customers using Kaseya VSA and Unitrends UniView will be able to see the volume of Microsoft 365 data Spanning can backup.

UniView is a SaaS-based management platform that provides UI and API integration across three best-of-breed approaches to backup and recovery.

VSA is remote monitoring and management solution which provides an all-in-one experience for endpoint management, automation, and protection.

GWS-022022.1
January 01, 2022
Backup for Google Workspace

Spanning integrates with Kaseya VSA and Unitrends UniView

Now customers using Kaseya VSA and Unitrends UniView will be able to log into Spanning for Google Workspace. Customers will also be able to see the last seven days backup statistics for Google Workspace within VSA and UniView.

UniView is a SaaS-based management platform that provides UI and API integration across three best-of-breed approaches to backup and recovery.

VSA is remote monitoring and management solution which provides an all-in-one experience for endpoint management, automation, and protection.

SFDC-012022
January 01, 2022
Backup for Salesforce

Self Service Delete

Customers now have access to Self-Service delete to have possibility to obfuscate or completely delete specified object IDs from the backup.

GWS-112021
November 01, 2021
Backup for Google Workspace

Spanning updates to Google Workspace Contacts API

Spanning has migrated from using the legacy Google Workspace Contacts API to their modern People API to continue providing backups for all your contacts. The Contacts API was sunset by Google on June 15th, 2021.

The People API lets you, read and manage the authenticated user’s Contacts, read, and copy the authenticated user’s “Other contacts”, read profile information for authenticated users and their contacts, and read domain profiles and contacts.

M365-112021
November 01, 2021
Backup for Microsoft 365

SharePoint Enhancements To Support Multi-Geo Capabilities

Multi-Geo capabilities increase data storage efficiency for an organization or user, as it lets users store data in a Preferred Data Location (PDL) on a per-user basis, which makes it easier to meet data residency requirements. Users still get a seamless experience when using Microsoft 365 services, including Office applications, OneDrive, and Search.

M365-102021
October 01, 2021
Backup for Microsoft 365

Ability to export your data and restore it 20% faster

Export functionality added to Spanning SharePoint Backup. Now clients can export and download their data from Spanning and restore it back to Microsoft 365. Additional improvements made have increased restore performance for SharePoint and OneDrive up to 20% faster. With this, Spanning provides you greater control over your data while making it lightning fast to recover.

M365-092021
September 01, 2021
Backup for Microsoft 365

New Data Center online in Canada Eh!

Enjoy greater flexibility and options with where your data is backed up with our latest data center now live in Canada. In our ongoing commitment to support our customers with their backup and recovery and assurance to be compliant with where they store data, Spanning now supports United States, Europe (Dublin), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Canada.

SFDC-062021
June 01, 2021
Backup for Salesforce

Improved Restore – Support for Repairing Lookup Relationships

When a record is deleted, like an Account for example, all its child records (Contacts, Opportunities, etc.) will also be deleted. This cascading deletion can be catastrophic for an organization. Spanning allows you to recover a deleted parent record and all its child records with a single restore. A relationship of this type is known in Salesforce as a “Master-Detail” relationship.

Sometimes, a Salesforce record may rely on information contained in other records. This information is usually obtained through what is known as a “Lookup Relationship.” Lookup relationships rely heavily on the Salesforce data model and the Salesforce Record ID. With just one click, you can now automatically update and repair any broken relationships in Salesforce to point to the newly restored record.

GWS-062021
June 01, 2021
Backup for Google Workspace

Added Encryption Support with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

Customers can now self-manage third-party encryption supported and managed by AWS. This new capability provides increase control over your data, managing compliance and regulatory controls, and complying with any internal or contracted policies for your organization.