Retrospect’s 18.5 release makes enhancements to the anomaly detection introduced in 18.0, and adds improvements and some new features to the software’s data immutability abilities.

Today, Retrospect, a StorCentric company, is announcing the general availability  of Retrospect Backup 18.5. It adds improved anomaly detection with filtering, threshold and notification capabilities, improved ransomware protection with data immutability through deeper Microsoft Azure Blob integration and bucket creation, and enhanced SQL and LTO-9 support. The principal target is ransomware, which is estimated to have extorted $20 billion out of businesses in 2021.

“18.5 is a big release for us,” said JG Heithcock, General Manager at Retrospect. “We originally introduced anomaly detection in Version 18, but it turned out to be more akin to a sledgehammer.”

With Version 18.5, the anomalies are detected based on customizable filters and thresholds tailored to individual environments. The Anomaly detection is integrated into Retrospect’s policy-based workflow, and with their hosted service, Retrospect Management Console, ensures customers and partners are notified about anomalies as soon as they happen.

“With this release, we are also adding the capability of putting up an immediate alert to say what’s happening,” Heithcock noted. “It would indicate that it might NOT be ransomware, but should be checked out anyway. This is behavioral based – not signature.”

Retrospect’s immutable backup user experience has been enhanced to automatically create cloud buckets with immutable backups supported by default.

“We added support for Azure Immutable Backups, which wasn’t in Version 18, and it didn’t have support for bucket creation,” Heithcock said. This Azure Blob integration lets users set individual immutable retention policies for different backup sets within the same Azure Storage Container.

Support has been added for LTO- 9, with capacities of up to 18TB [45TB compressed].

“LTO-9 is much faster and much better than LTO-8,” Heithcock said. “We have a lot of old school people who still back up to tape. The tape market is not growing, but it isn’t going away as fast as you might think.”

Another layer of anti-ransomware protection was established with the validation of S3 in StorCentric’s Unity 7.0 solution.

“Unity 7.0 now has an S3 layer where we can run on top, and basically treat it as a private cloud, which has object lock,” Heithcock said. “Object lock is common in clouds.”

“Ransomware comes up so frequently now that companies need tools like anomaly detection and immutable backups to detect and defend their core data from threats, and enabling IT admins to adjust the filtering and alert thresholds helps companies tailor the detection algorithm to their needs,” said Reuben Herfindahl, Owner of Digital Brigade.

Retrospect Backup 18.5 is a free upgrade to Retrospect Backup 18.

All the StorCentric companies, including Retrospect, have been acquired since the StorCentric holding company was formed in 2018. Retrospect, which traces its lineage back to Dantz early this century, which was acquired by EMC, and which later had multiple spinouts along its journey, was acquired by StorCentric in 2019.