Last document update: January 10, 2024
Table of contents
What's new
Platform: AI-assistant for onboarding in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
The AI-assistant provides partners with immediate, consistent, and always available guidance for product and sales related queries. The assistant enhances team efficiency by offering short instructions, references for detailed information, and seamless handover to live agents or support ticket submission if needed. It translates automatically the conversations between a user and a live agent if the user speaks a non-English language. Also, the AI-assistant allows switching between ongoing and previous chats via a streamlined chat management menu, ensuring uninterrupted support and onboarding experience.
In the new AI-assistant chat, partners can:
- Ask AI-assistant about any product and sales related topics. The AI-assistant provides a short instruction and references for more detailed information.
- Switch from AI-assistant to a live agent from our Sales team if there is need to involve them.
- Submit a support ticket from the chat if the live agent is offline.
- Use the auto-translation feature in the chat to communicate with a live agent in their own native language.
- Start a new chat and return to previous chats through the chat management menu.
Licensing
All licenses
Platform: Communication Center (product inbox)
The Communication Center enables users to receive updates and notifications without leaving the platform, in a persistent product inbox. It keeps partners and customers informed about new features, growth opportunities, and ecosystem enhancements, and enhances the engagement and productivity.
Licensing
All licenses
Backup: FIPS 140-2 compliance
Addresses the compliance needs of highly regulated customers by extending FIPS 140-2 adherence. Partners can confidently serve customers with strict compliance requirements, expanding their potential market.
Licensing
Standard protection
Backup: Search in encrypted archives
We enabled the search for content within encrypted archives, eliminating the need to manually locate files. This saves significant time and effort, especially when the exact file location is uncertain.
Note that this feature will become available gradually during the following months.
Licensing
Standard protection
Disaster Recovery: Protection dashboard
The dashboard provides partners with a real-time overview and actionable insights into customers’ DR sites throughout their entire lifecycle. The Protection dashboard streamlines the configuration and the management of DR solutions, and allows for faster response times and improved customer satisfaction.
Licensing
Standard Disaster Recovery, Advanced Disaster Recovery
Advanced XDR: Threat hunting with event search (early access)
Now MSPs can proactively hunt for Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and suspicious activities across managed workloads. MSPs can detect and mitigate threats before they escalate into critical incidents, strengthening the overall security posture.
With new event search, partners can perform the following operations:
- Run custom queries on event data collected from across all their workloads to search for hashes or pull metrics to answer certain questions. For example, a query can be run to show workloads with an unusually high number of processes.
- Filter queries using attributes provided by EDR endpoints and data from XDR integrations (email, user activities, and network activities).
- View an intuitive summary of data based on queries that assists in incident investigation or in the hunting of threats.
- Save and share queries among users within the same organization.
Licensing
Advanced Security + XDR pack
Advanced Email Security: View Microsoft quarantined emails in the Email Security console
This feature facilitates the management of quarantined emails within a single console, improving operational efficiency. It provides partners and technicians with greater control over quarantined messages, overcoming the limitations of the built-in quarantine feature in Microsoft 365. In the first half of 2025, the functionality will be extended to releasing quarantined Microsoft emails directly from the Email Security console.
Additional information:
- Microsoft's built-in quarantine feature is not configurable in Microsoft 365.
- Enabling this feature for existing customer tenants requires explicit enablement, as additional permissions are required in Microsoft 365.
- Newly onboarded Microsoft 365 tenants will have this feature enabled by default.
Licensing
Advanced Email Security
Acronis RMM (Advanced Management): Automatic onboarding via Active Directory
The onboarding of Windows devices into Cyber Protect Cloud can be automated by remotely installing the protection agent, registering devices, and applying plans through Active Directory. Company administrators can use a domain controller with an installed protection agent to onboard devices at scale, without manual preconfiguration. This feature accelerates the time-to-protection and frees staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
The new onboarding option enables partners to:
- Onboard discovered devices from Active Directory using a domain controller with installed protection agent without any manual pre-configuration.
- Enroll both online and offline devices (if they return online within 24 hours of process initiation).
- Select which agent components to install and under which user account to register the device.
- Select which plans to apply after the registration of device: Protection, Monitoring, Remote management.
- Monitor the progress of agent installation via the Activities tab.
Licensing
Standard protection
Acronis RMM (Advanced Management): Advanced reboot configuration in Software Management
The new reboot configuration options minimize disruptions by providing clear end-user notifications and flexible reboot settings, reducing productivity loss and data risks. IT admins gain granular control over reboot behavior, enabling tailored configurations for various scenarios. The user experience is enhanced with customizable reminders and options for deferring actions.
Advanced reboot configuration is now available for the following scenarios:
- Security updates: automatic reboot for critical security updates to ensure they are applied promptly.
- Software deployment: admins can configure reboot behavior based on the specific software being installed.
- Policy migration: existing policies will be automatically updated to incorporate the new reboot settings.
Licensing
Advanced Management
Acronis PSA (Advanced Automaton): Customer tickets summary report
The Customer tickets summary report enables MSPs to get complete visibility into customer support operations. MSPs can save time preparing for monthly and quarterly business reviews with their customers, and get insights into their team performance:
- Get insights into team performance with metrics such as the number of opened, resolved, and SLA breached tickets, types and categories, SLA performance, and NPS.
- Save time preparing for monthly and quarterly business reviews with the customers.
- Generate customer-facing reports with customizable layouts and export options, tailored to meet client expectations.
The following details are available in the report:
- Ticket summary: created, closed and SLA breached ticket.
- Key ticket details: ticket source, number and title, type and category, priority, end-user and agent.
- Time details: total time spent, billable, non-billable, billed time.
- SLA details: SLA name, SLA breaches and NPS rating.
Licensing
Advanced Automation
Acronis PSA (Advanced Automaton): Partner onboarding improvements and default product configuration
The onboarding process for partners activating Acronis PSA (Advanced Automation) is simpler now. This enables partners to quickly start using key modules by utilizing predefined default product configuration:
- Default products, such as Support per hour, Support outside of business hours, Block hours.
- Default tax rates.
- Default billing, service desk and invoicing settings.
- Default customer settings such as Invoice delivery method, Payment terms.
- New bulk delete operation for Sales items in "Pending" status.
The improvements in this release allow MSPs to simplify their onboarding process by using default products, settings and configuration. Now it is easier for MSPs to generate their first invoice and create their first ticket in Acronis PSA (Advanced Automation), and fine-tune the product defaults later.
Licensing
Advanced Automation
Files Cloud: Password-protected public links for Cyber Files Cloud
Password-protected public links ensure that sensitive or confidential data is only accessible to authorized recipients. Password-protected public links prevent accidental sharing, which lowers the risk of breaches for clients and reduces MSP's exposure to security risks:
- End user selects the Public with password protection option in the Link access restrictions section, and configures a password and expiration date.
- Files and folders with password-protected links can be accessed only if the recipient knows the password.
Licensing
Cyber Files Cloud
Updated Components
Cyber Protection agent
The Acronis Cyber Protection agent has new versions as follows.
- Acronis Cyber Protection agent for Windows (v.24.12.39248)
- Acronis Cyber Protection agent for Mac (v.24.12.39248)
- Acronis Cyber Protection agent for Linux (v.24.12.39248)
See the release history 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 and the history of changes in Acronis Cyber Cloud API in the dedicated API change log document.
Fixed issues
Security
For information about security issues fixed in this release, please refer to https://security-advisory.acronis.com/updates/UPD-2412-8737-0cc7.
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
Backup
- [ABR-394809] Unable to save backup plans after editing.
Common
- [ABR-394809] Unable to save backup plans after editing.
- [ABR-394319] Protection plans show warnings about compatibility issues for modules that are not enabled in the plans.
- [ABR-390481] Error 500 occurs when trying to create a protection plan.
Cyber Protection agent
- [ABR-350520] The mobile offering usage is not properly updated in the management console.
- [ABR-387069] The recovery points content is empty when trying to recover via Cloud Storage.
- [ABR-392281] The error 'The password for the backup is incorrect' occurs if the password for the archive contains a trailing whitespace.
- [ABR-393081] Improved error message for backups that fail with the error "At least one validation method has failed for one or more backups".
- [ABR-393634] The updates of Cyber Protection agent fail if the path to temp directory contains spaces.
- [ABR-394049] Backups of MySQL fail with the error "The user account that is running Managed Machine Service does not have enough privileges to access instance 'HIT'. To back up or recover the instance, this account must be granted the sysadmin role on the SQL Server."
- [ADP-35855] The updates of Cyber Protection agent for GoogleDrive fail with error code 1638.
- [ADP-38733], [ADP-38943] Cyber Protection definitions cannot be updated.
- [PLTFRM-72491] The Cyber Protection agent generates excessive amount of large log files.
Disaster Recovery
- [DRAAS-31035] A Windows blue screen error might occur after a test failover operations.
-
[ABR-381542] Linux systems stop responding after a test failover.
macOS
- [ABR-392221] A warning about the schredwrapper library appears during the restart of macOS machines after and update of the Cyber Protection agent.
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other applications protection
- [ABR-391588] Unable to delete cloud-to-cloud backups if the cloud storage is full.
- [ABR-392744] Replications of encrypted backups on cloud end with the error "The activity has failed due to an unexpected machine reboot or the backup process was terminated."
- [ABR-383507] Backup of Microsoft Teams generates multiple warnings in the log file "[Archive Server]: bad request."
- [ABR-377132] Backup plans for SQL servers fail with the warning "Assertion failed: !"Unknown filegroup type."
Known issues and limitations
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
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 Knowledge Base.