The Cove Data Protection team has been busy, and this month we’re ready to unveil some big new things! Highlights include general availability of Cove’s Standby Image to Microsoft Azure, a public preview of Microsoft 365 Teams backup, as well as various usability enhancements. Let’s go!

Continuity update: Standby Image to Azure
We recently announced the expansion of our disaster recovery capabilities to include a smarter approach to DRaaS: Cove + Microsoft Azure. This week, standby image to Azure is generally available. This is a new recovery target option for the Cove Continuity feature.

For one price, you can choose fully hosted automated recovery testing, or standby image to the location of your choice – at a remote location, at a central data center, or now, in Microsoft Azure. Cove’s proactive Continuity features offer a smarter way to respond to a full device outage, without an expensive proprietary appliance.

Preview of Microsoft 365 Teams backup
Beginning this week, a free preview of Cove Data Protection for Teams and Channels is available worldwide. Additional capabilities and fine-tuning will continue during the coming months, and we look forward to your feedback as we work toward general availability later this year.

Additional enhancements to Microsoft 365 protection
Billing data collection has been enhanced with the addition of a new export capability for protected users in each Microsoft 365 tenant. Lists of protected users can be downloaded as an XLSX or CSV file.

Enhancements to one-time (on demand) restore to Azure
Usability improvements to this feature include:

• The ability to remove a device from the Restore to Azure dashboard
• A new extra check at the first step of the Restore to Azure wizard to ensure the Recovery Location is properly configured
• A new option for faster recovery by choosing to restore only the OS disk at first, and selectively restore the most important data to resume operations more quickly
• The ability to automatically switch on Cove backup on a restored VM
• A new extra check at the VM settings step of the Restore to Azure wizard to ensure the user has the required subscription access level
• The ability to re-load backup sessions for a device at the Backup session wizard step
• Additional information about Azure user requirements has been added to the Connect step of the Restore to Azure wizard
• A new “Recovery Completed At” column has been added to the default Restore to Azure dashboard

Management Console & new Mac support
This release includes even more UI improvements, and we strongly recommend that any partners still using the legacy dashboard switch to the new one, as the prior dashboard UI will be retired in July. A walk-through of the newer dashboard is available here.

In addition, we are pleased to announce official support of the Ventura MacOS. A new MacOS installer with this version change is available now.