Last document update: June 28s, 2024
Table of contents
What's new
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) – General Availability
XDR offers a complete, natively integrated, highly efficient solution, purpose-built for MSPs.
- Extended protection for client environments across vulnerable attack surfaces with extensive visibility covering endpoints, email, Entra ID, and M365 applications (SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams), ensuring protection against sophisticated threat landscapes.
- Natively integrated across cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management. XDR is designed to protect vulnerable attack surfaces for unmatched business continuity.
- Highly efficient, with the ability to easily launch, manage, scale, and deliver security services. In addition, XDR includes AI-based incident analysis and single-click response for easy investigation.
- Built for MSPs, including a single agent and console for all services, and a customizable platform to integrate additional tools into your technology stack.
Licensing
Advanced Security + XDR
EDR support for macOS workloads
With this release, EDR offers the following enhancements:
- Comprehensive EDR coverage for mixed environments of Windows and macOS workloads by extending EDR coverage to macOS devices.
- Simplified EDR deployments as customers can now deploy EDR across most of their workloads and have complete visibility of all assets.
- Detection of suspicious and malicious files/processes on macOS workloads and mapping these detections to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
- Future releases will add support for rollback of changes, and workload isolation and restarts.
- Supported OS versions: macOS 13 and later.
Licensing
Advanced Security + XDR
Enabling EDR without additional dependencies
Prior to the 24.05 release, customers were required to enable all Antivirus & Antimalware, Active Protection, and URL filtering functionality in order to enable EDR.
Starting with 24.05, these dependencies are removed, and customers can now use EDR functionality while disabling any of the Antivirus & Antimalware, Active Protection and URL filtering functionality (except for the Behavior engine).
- When customers enable EDR, they can now enable all, some, or none of the Antivirus & Antimalware, Active Protection, and URL filtering options (except for the Behavior engine).
- When customers disable any of the Antivirus & Antimalware, Active Protection, and URL filtering functionality in the protection plan, EDR is not disabled.
- We still recommend customers to enable all Antivirus & Antimalware, Active Protection, and URL functionality (including EDR) to ensure the best protection coverage.
Licensing
Advanced Security + XDR
Advanced Management: Device Sense™ Device Discovery
Eliminate uncertainty: gain better visibility into client networks and enhance service delivery!
Device Sense™ Device Discovery adds the following benefits to the Advanced Management pack:
- Automated device discovery to help MSPs to effortlessly uncover, identify, and protect devices running on their customer networks, while understanding client infrastructure, and delivering more effective managed services.
- Insight into the customer's environment during onboarding that helps MSPs increase their revenue per customer by expanding service offerings with proactive protection, security and monitoring services, helping to facilitate data-driven decision making.
- Uncovering unprotected devices allows MSPs to take a proactive approach by regularly reviewing client needs, identifying new opportunities for improvement, and recommending Acronis protection solutions.
- Detection of unauthorized access attempts that aids MSPs in taking proactive measures to mitigate risks by enhancing the overall security posture of the client's network.
Device Sense™ Device Discovery adds the following functionality:
- Passive device discovery using Device Sense™ to identify and catalog devices in customers' networks.
- On-demand active device discovery using Device Sense™ for comprehensive data device collection and identification.
- Browsing for the discovered device's details across all networks or per specific network.
- Advanced filtering/search capabilities by device type, IP address, etc.
- Configuration of alerts for newly discovered devices in networks.
- Automatic prevention of non-corporate network scan.
- Onboarding of discovered devices with agent remote installation and protection plan, monitoring plan, and remote desktop plan enablement.
- Extending discovered devices report with new parameters (device types, MAC addresses, model, manufacturer, etc.)
Licensing
Standard protection
Agentless backup of Azure virtual machines
The agentless backup for Azure virtual machines is a fast and reliable backup solution developed in tight cooperation with Microsoft. It offers flexible storage options: Acronis Cloud or Azure storage, as well as other public clouds, and enables cross-platform migration to Azure VMs from anywhere (Any-to-Azure).
This feature offers the following benefits:
- Simplified initial setup of access to Azure Subscription via oAuth-based authentication.
-
Azure Restore Points-specific options:
- Number of Azure Restore Points to keep: 3 (default).
- Azure Restore Points consistency level and detection of unsupported disks, such as “unmanaged”, “shared” or “Ephemeral”.
Licensing
- Virtual Machine quota per Azure VM (same as for other VMs).
- Acronis Cyber Protect 16 Cloud Deployment: Advanced Virtual Host for all VMs.
Support for new operating systems
In this release, we added support for backup and recovery for new versions of the following operating systems:
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
- Red Hat 9.4
- Oracle Linux 9.4
- CloudLinux 9.4
- AlmaLinux 9.4
- Rocky Linux 9.4
Licensing
Standard protection
Advanced Disaster Recovery: Fast failback to original virtual machines
With this new functionality, only the changes (delta) are transferred from Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud back to the on-premises site, making the data transfer operation up to three times faster.
In combination with the incremental failback, when a virtual machine in the cloud continues to run during data transfer, the whole failback process becomes a smooth and fast operation with near-zero downtime.
Supported scenarios:
- Agent-based via bootable media: Perform a failback to the original virtual or physical machine (only the delta changes will be transferred), or to a new physical machine.
-
Agentless via hypervisor agent: Perform a failback to a new virtual machine. This virtual machine will be created automatically by the corresponding hypervisor agent.
- Fast failback available for both virtual and physical machines.
Licensing
Advanced Disaster Recovery
Advanced Disaster Recovery: Hard reset of recovery/primary servers running in the Acronis Cloud
If a virtual machine running in the Acronis Cloud becomes unresponsive, a customer administrator can perform a hard reset without contacting support.
Supported scenarios:
- Forced power off for a recovery server in test/production failover.
- Forced power off for a primary server.
Licensing
Standard and Advanced Disaster Recovery
Advanced Automation: Stock inventory
This new functionality enables MSPs to handle stock inventory business cases for selling or holding equipment, allowing them to:
- Search for and manage inventory items.
- Manage multiple inventory locations and transfer items between them.
- Sell inventory to clients, through quoting, billing and invoicing.
- Track inventory profitability and costs.
- Get insights into the total inventory and its age.
- Use inventory item descriptions, pricing and other stored information in quotes and sales items for frictionless billing.
Supported scenarios:
- Manage stock inventory records, including quantity, buying/selling price, purchase details, serial numbers, and warranty information.
- Sell in-stock inventory and bill clients via quotes or sales items.
Licensing
Advanced Automation
Advanced Disaster Recovery: End of support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on June 30, 2024
Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in Advanced Disaster Recovery will end on June 30, 2024. After this date, we will no longer provide any software or security updates to support Disaster Recovery scenarios for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS workloads. Learn more.
Updated components
Cyber Protection agent
The Acronis Cyber Protection agent has new versions as follows:
- Acronis Cyber Protection Agent for Windows (v.24.5.38101)
- Acronis Cyber Protection Agent for Mac (v.24.5.38101)
- Acronis Cyber Protection Agent for Linux (v.24.5.38101)
See the release notes for the Acronis Cyber Protection agent here.
Changes in Acronis Cyber Cloud API
Upcoming end of support for /api/ams REST API
The /api/ams/ REST API, which is used for backup and resource management, will be deprecated and replaced by a new API. The new API will accommodate all integrations and automation scenarios that currently use /api/ams/.
The /api/ams/ REST API is not an official and public API. However, some customers are using it for integration and automation tasks. To ensure smooth transition, the deprecation will be done in phases, with one year of notice for each phase.
Herein we officially announce the beginning of the one year notice period for Phase 1. Documentation on how to migrate to the new public REST API will be provided.
One year after the official announcement of deprecation, there will be no commitment to support the /api/ams/ endpoints, even though they might still be available.
You can find more information an the history of changes in Acronis Cyber Cloud API in the dedicated API change log document.
Fixed issues
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
Cyber Protection agent
- [ABR-384340] The installation of Cyber Protection agent fails with the error "Failed to add user .\ to the service user list."
- [ABR-383472] Only full backups are created instead of incremental ones.
- [ABR-371515] MS SQL database instance is removed from the protection plan if the SQL server is stopped while stopping the MMS service.
- [ABR-357358] A false alert "Backup is not responding" is triggered if a retention operation takes more time than the period configured for it. For example, you have configured an hourly retention rule, but the backup takes more than an hour to complete.
- [ADP-34634] Auto update fails with task manager error 500 - Internal Server Error.
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other applications protection
- [ABR-385612] Backup operations fail with the error "Agent processing task is not responding...."
Quarantine
- [AMP-25187] Threat name is not visible in the Quarantine list.
Known issues and limitations
Cyber Protection agent
Backup
- [ABR-365442] The backup validation completes successfully, but the validation status is incorrect or missing in backup sets with a large number of backups.
- [ABR-361097] It is possible to create backups with special characters in their names, but such backups are not accessible when saved on a network storage.
- Solution: Do not use special characters in backup names, even though the application allows you to.
- [ABR-305920] The backups of System state performed via the Windows Server Backup feature fail with the error message "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process."
Bootable media
- [ABR-358235] WinPE-based media: Unable to browse backup files if the cloud storage location contains corrupted backup archives.
Cyber Protection Agent
- [ABR-371912] The Acronis SnapAPI module may require separate compilation after installation on Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux 8.7 distributions.
- Solution: Compile the SnapAPI module manually after installing the Agent for Linux on a workload that runs on a Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux 8.7 distribution.
Recovery
- [ABR-371521] When browsing backup archives, the sorting of files by last change date does not work correctly.
Virtualization protection
- [ABR-383978] No alert about almost reached storage quota is displayed for agentless Microsoft Azure VM backups.
- [ABR-383972] No alert about exceeded storage quota is displayed for agentless Microsoft Azure VM backups.
For more information on known issues and workarounds, please visit our Support Portal.