Control 3.4: Headline Features

Control 3.4 adds Clean Room, a place to prove your recovery actually works, puts a second pair of eyes on the actions that carry real risk, and teaches Mia to look forwards as well as back. Here is what is new for you.

Clean Room: prove your recovery, in isolation

Clean Room is a new engine in Control for your isolated recovery environment: somewhere you can bring systems up away from production and check they really do come back.

You get a live view of your virtual data centres and the machines inside them, laid out as cards with the numbers that matter: how many machines are running, how much CPU, memory and storage they are using. You can search and page through large estates, filter by power state, and open a machine straight into the vendor console when you need to.

Better still, you can open a VM console in your browser. Click a machine and its screen opens in a resizable pop-out window, sized to the guest's own resolution, with no vendor client, no separate login, no leaving the portal.

Recovery sessions record the runs themselves. Each session tracks what was recovered and how it progressed, keeps an audit trail of every step, and feeds a run history so you can show a pattern of successful recoveries over time rather than a single point-in-time screenshot. Analytics keep the peak machine, CPU, memory and storage figures so you can see how the environment is trending, and Clean Room usage flows into billing alongside your other engines.

Four eyes on the actions that matter

Some actions are too consequential for one person acting alone. Control 3.4 adds four-eyes approvals: a maker requests the action, a second person (a Security Officer) approves it, and only then does it run.

You choose what it covers. Out of the box it can guard a Zerto live failover, deleting a tenant or an edition, and HYCU policy changes such as setting a default or editing a policy. Your administrator decides which actions need approval, how many approvals are required, and how long a request stays open before it expires.

The request itself is clear from both sides. The person asking sees "submit for approval" rather than a confirm button, so there is no surprise about what happens next. The approver sees an inbox with what is being asked, who asked, and how they authenticated when they asked it. Requests that nobody decides expire on their own rather than lingering.

For the moments when waiting is not an option there is a break-glass override, and it is recorded as exactly that, flagged in the ledger so it stands out on review. The whole audit trail can be exported for compliance, and if an officer leaves your organisation their vote stops counting.

Mia can now look forwards

Mia gains forecasting. As well as telling you where your storage is today, she can project where it is heading (with a forecast band that shows the range rather than a single misleading line) and explain the growth behind it.

New alongside it: growth analysis to show how quickly things are changing, and top movers to show what changed most, so you can see which accounts or workloads are driving your consumption rather than reading a total and guessing. Mia can also generate and export a report from within the chat, and she now covers Clean Room and Veeam alarms as well as the engines she already knew.

More control over what your users see

Service filters and per-engine permissions now reach further, so a user only sees the accounts and engines they should. On the HYCU engine your administrator can also curate which SaaS services are offered when someone adds a source, so the list shows the services you actually sell rather than the vendor's full catalogue.

Veeam alarms you can act on

Triggered Veeam alarms can now be acknowledged and resolved from the live view, and a new alarm history shows how alarms have trended over time, with the changes since the previous period, so a noisy week is visible as a pattern rather than a list.

Planned maintenance, published

When you schedule maintenance, Control can now publish it to your status page and pause the affected monitors for the window, so your customers see the notice and your alerting stays quiet while the work happens. Maintenance windows carry a type and a notice period, with sensible defaults.

Settings worth mentioning

Multiple Asigra and Veeam sites are now configured properly, each with its own connection. Your tenant appearance settings are rebuilt around a live brand preview, so you can see your logo and colours before you save. There is a map-based timezone picker, and your administrator can allow tenants to configure their own external login providers.

Control 3.4 gives you somewhere to prove your recovery, a second signature on the actions that carry risk, and an assistant that can tell you where you are heading rather than only where you have been.