What's New in Cayosoft Guardian v2

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Cayosoft Guardian vs. Guardian Forest Recovery 

Cayosoft Guardian now has two distinct licensing modes, Guardian and Guardian Forest Recovery. Guardian Forest Recovery is an affordable premium upgrade to Guardian adding Immediate Active Directory Full-Forest Recovery.  Go here if you have questions about Guardian Forest Recovery.

Immediate Active Directory Full-Forest Recovery 

Cayosoft Guardian now offers Immediate Active Directory Full-Forest Recovery for protection of your Active Directory Forest(s) allowing for the fastest possible from business outages after Ransomware or Wiper Cyberattacks against Active Directory.

Automatic Rollback for Change Alerts 

Custom Change Alerts can now be created to notify admins when critical changes are detected. Creating an alert begins on the Change History page where the admin can easily add a Alert Job to any saved query. An Alert Job is a workflow with predefined configurable actions and an execution schedule. If data is returned data matching the query's settings when the query is run by the Alert Job the selected actions workflow items are then performed. The action(s) in the Alerting Job workflow can raise real-time alerts for each change detected, send notifications through Microsoft Teams and/or by email, and optionally automatically rollback the detected change(s). Alerts can be added to any query across any connected Azure AD tenants or Active Directory forests. 

Custom Reports delivered by email or Microsoft Teams

Custom Reports can now be created and sent to admins when an important change(s) has been detected. Creating a report begins on the Change History page where the admin can easily add a Report Job to any saved query. An Report Job is a workflow with predefined configurable actions and an execution schedule. If data is returned data matching the query's settings when the query is run by the Report Job the selected actions workflow items are then performed.  The action(s) in the Report Job workflow can create a report file to export in HTML or CSV formats and send a notification through Microsoft Teams and/or by email. Exported reports can be delivered as link to the Guardian Web Portal where they can be displayed or as an attachment to a notification message. Reports can be added to any query across any connected Azure AD tenants or Active Directory forests. In addition to Change Reporting Cayosoft Guardian now has the ability to export change history records to a file in either HTML or CSV format.

Change History now includes object recreation details

Cayosoft Guardian Change History was reorganized adding the ability to show a unified Change History with change records of a hard-deleted object and the new re-created object added after the delete is rolled-back.

More Protection for legacy Active Directory

Cayosoft Guardian now provides monitoring and protection for On-premises AD Schema, Configuration, and Application partitions. With the new version, change records contain security descriptors in a human-readable format. 

More Protection for Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes

A new built-in alerting rule notifies an administrator about mailbox permissions and forwarding rules changes.

Delegation Over Native Recycle Bins

Delegation over on-premises and cloud Microsoft Recycle Bin has added through integration with Cayosoft Administrator. In the Cayosoft Administrator Configuration Console under the Connected Systems configuration, Cayosoft Guardian Integration extension now appears. When this extension is enabled, new Recycle Bin Web Queries are displayed in Active Directory and Microsoft Office 365 Admin Units. Using these Web Queries, you can Undelete deleted objects. With Cayosoft Guardian Integration, administrators can quickly see, understand, and rollback mistakes or malicious  changes across the hybrid Active Directory environment within their scope of delegation. Cayosoft Guardian Integration extension provides Recycle Bin web queries and Undelete web action to undelete Active Directory objects and Office 365 users and groups. 

 

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.4	8188, 8819, 9108, 9463	Cayosoft Guardian now offers Immediate Active Directory Full-Forest Recovery and enables the protection of your Active Directory Forest against forest-wide or domain-wide failures. This feature requires the Cayosoft Guardian Forest Recovery upgrade. With backup plans, you can configure and control backup process of your entire Active Directory environment. Backup plans are scheduled jobs that create backups of the selected domain controllers in the backup locations such as network file shares. With forest recovery plans, you can design, verify and regularly test the recovery of your Active Directory forest. Recovery plans are jobs that allow recovering a set of selected domain controllers to a pre-configured recovery site using previously created domain controllers backups. Pre-recovery validation ensures recovery plan consistency and readiness of target machines in the recovery site. The recovery process itself is fully automated. AD DC recovery plan automates authoritative or non-authoritative restores of the domain controllers. AD DC recovery plans are jobs that allow recovering Active Directory database and SYSVOL on domain controllers using backups that were created earlier.	Active Directory, Forest Recovery
2.4	9271	Cayosoft Guardian simplifies AD forest recovery plan creation with the automated selection of backup files most suitable for the defined recovery point. Smart recovery plan creation automatically selects domain controllers to be recovered, configures DNS settings, and picks other recovery parameters.	Forest Recovery
2.4	8190, 9539	Cayosoft Guardian Recovery Site in Azure feature automates provisioning of required VM, network, and storage resources in Azure, fully isolated from your production environment. These resources collectively form a fully-functional and isolated site ready for immediate recovery of Active Directory forest. After forest recovery, that site can be preserved for testing purposes or as a stand-by forest in case your production Active Directory goes down.	Active Directory, Forest Recovery
2.4	9005	Cayosoft Guardian can now be installed on Windows Server 2022 and supports Active Directory domain controllers with Windows Server 2022 for change and event collection.	Service
2.4	9227, 8420	Cayosoft Guardian uses agents to back up and recover domain controllers in the Active Directory forest. The agent is a component of Cayosoft Guardian that is deployed automatically on the managed machines such as the machines in the recovery site or domain controllers to be backed up. Agents Management node shows agents that previously have been communicating with Cayosoft Guardian Server.	Service, Forest Recovery
2.4	9256	An issue has been resolved when the collection of Exchange Online mailboxes changes in Cayosoft Guardian might take an inadequately long time.	Exchange Online
2.4	8426, 9475, 8426	Cayosoft Guardian uses Backup Locations to store Domain Controller backups. At least one Backup storage must be configured in Cayosoft Guardian before any backup plans or recovery plans can be created. Backup location is a network file share or Azure file share where the backup files can be created and managed.	Forest Recovery
2.4	8656	Default retention rule for backup location provides a cleanup process to delete older and outdated backups.	Forest Recovery
2.4	9355, 9372, 9396	Multiple issues related to the recovery of Azure AD security groups have been resolved.	Azure AD
2.4	8282	Cayosoft Guardian Forest Recovery license is a new premium subscription license that enables features related to Forest Recovery, as well as change audit and collection features included in other subscriptions.	Licensing, Forest Recovery
2.4	8842, 9560, 6925, 8382, 8680	Cayosoft Guardian's user experience was improved.	Usability

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.3.3	9133	An issue has been resolved when Cayosoft Guardian was unable to collect Exchange Online mailbox changes in a multi-geo tenant environment.	Exchange Online
2.3.3	9145	An issue has been resolved with the Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal user interface unexpectedly redirected a user to the Dashboard.	Usability
2.3.3	9135	An issue has been resolved when Cayosoft Guardian was unable to restore deleted Administrative Unit in Azure AD.	Azure AD
2.3.3	9256	An issue has been resolved when the collection of Exchange Online mailboxes changes in Cayosoft Guardian might take an inadequately long time.	Exchange Online
2.3.3	9134	Cayosoft Guardian's user experience was improved.	Usability

 

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.2.3	7397	New built-in role Global Reader is added to Cayosoft Guardian. A user with a Global Reader role has read-only access to Cayosoft Guardian and will not be able to modify configuration or restore objects.	Delegation
2.2.3	8359	With new version of Cayosoft Guardian, Exchange Online mailbox data collection performance was dramatically increased.	Exchange Online
2.2.3	8506, 8508, 8509, 8518	The issues when Cayosoft Guardian didn't show an initiator for Change History records for related changes in the Active Directory and in the Exchange Online have been resolved.	Change History

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.2.1	5730, 8453, 8454	The issues have been resolved when Cayosoft Guardian fails to detect the initiator of a change in Active Directory.	Change Auditing

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.2.0	8322	Cayosoft Guardian now provides enhanced support for Azure SQL including fine-tuned retry mechanisms.	Service
2.2.0	8093, 8094, 8095	Cayosoft Guardian now collects usage statistics. Collected data helps Cayosoft to enhance existing features and design new ones.	Service
2.2.0	6741, 6664	Cayosoft Guardian now offers enhanced database size management. Retention rules allow defining queries to select objects to be retained. An alert is added to notify a user about the database size exceeded a predefined value.	Service
2.2.0	6986	Licensing rules were modified to match the updated Cayosoft license agreement.	Licensing
2.2.0	8277	The automatic rollback process was improved in several different areas. System changes will be excluded from the rollback action.	Service
2.2.0	8171	The initiator detection process was improved in several different areas.	Service
2.2.0	8132, 8056, 8165	Cayosoft Guardian's user experience was improved in several different areas.	Usability

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.1.2	8013	An issue has been resolved when a Cayosoft Guardian user signed with an Microsoft 365 account no longer could access Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal after a 24-hour inactivity period.	Usability
2.1.2	8020	An issue has been resolved when a backup job might fail with error after upgrade from Cayosoft Guardian version 1.4 or previous version in case this job targets an Active Directory domain in a forest with Exchange extended schema.	Service
2.1.2	8021	An issue has been resolved when a job with modified schedule settings could not be saved.	Usability
2.1.2	8057	An issue has been resolved when Cayosoft Guardian might not correctly collect and display changes of the Exchange Online mailbox permissions and Azure Resource Administrators role assignments. Important: The existing records containing above mentioned changes should not be used for restore.	Service

 

Version	ID	Item	Product Area
2.1	7296	Cayosoft Guardian now allows all applied filter conditions in the Change History section of the Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal to be preserved as a saved query. Saved Queries provide quick access to a filtered list of changes. A saved query is used in alerting rules and scheduled reports.	Usability
2.1	4989, 7319, 7643	A new Alerting Rule now can be created from a user-defined saved query. A new Change History Record matching the Saved query raises an alert in almost real-time. Raised alert initiates a workflow that might include sending notification messages and even automatic rollback. Alert notifications via email and Teams can be customized and include important details about changes in your environment.	Alerting
2.1	7279, 7391,7326	A new scheduled report now can be created from a user-defined saved query. The scheduled report can be sent via email or Teams in HTML or CSV format. A report can be delivered in a message as a link to Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal or as a file attachment to a message.	Reporting
2.1	7473, 7315	Instant export of data is now available in the Change History section of the Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal. Data can be exported in HTML, CSV, or JSON format.	Reporting
2.1	5367	Now Cayosoft Guardian preserves change history records of an original hard-deleted object and shows them as part of the change history of a new object. This allows to see uninterrupted history of changes in Cayosoft Guardian even original object and re-created object have different unique identifiers within the management system and native auditing tools.	Usability
2.1	7002	Recent changes dashboard now shows a graph with a number of alerts.	Usability
2.1	7480	Built-in alerts for mailbox permission changes in Exchange Online have been added.	Alerting/Exchange online
2.1	7444	Advanced filter supporting OData query language is added on the filters panel in the Change History section of the Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal.	Usability
2.1	7508	Changes of AD security descriptors are now presented in a user-friendly format. A built-in alert has been added for DACL changes of an AdminSDHolder object to prevent attack based on a modification of this object.	Active Directory
2.1	7408	Support for backup and restore of Schema, Configuration, and Application partitions in the Active Directory forest has been added.	Active Directory
2.1	6505	Support for backup and restore of booking options for Resource Mailbox has been added.	Exchange Online
2.1	7668	An article describing the permissions requirements for the Cayosoft Guardian service account to collect and restore changes in the Active Directory is now available.	Documentation
2.1	4738	Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal now provides enhanced reporting for scenarios where the service encountered errors on start.	Usability
2.1	6505	Cayosoft now supports monitoring and restoration of Booking options for Resource Mailboxes.	Exchange Online
2.1	7884	Change History records from the Active Directory now include information about an originating domain controller.	Active Directory
2.1	7885	Cayosoft Guardian now provides additional information for troubleshooting unexpected account lockout issues. Cayosoft Guardian collects events 4625, 4740, 4767 from the logs on a domain controller and attaches these events data to the related change history records.	Active Directory
2.1	5927	During installation Cayosoft Guardian now provides an option to specify installation folder.	Installation
2.1	7415	Cayosoft Guardian now provides a user interface to manage Remote PowerShell settings.	Service
2.1	4989, 5717, 6384, 7070, 7073, 7219, 7313,7316, 7317, 7320, 7544, 7545, 7556, 7643, 7697	Cayosoft Guardian's user experience improved in several different areas.	Usability