Acronis Brings Data Protection to Google Cloud

Written by Frank J. Ohlhorst
March 16, 2018

MSPs looking to delve into cloud-based backup will find an Acronis-Google Cloud pairing an effective ally.

MSPs looking to expand their backup and continuity offerings will surely benefit from an alliance between Acronis and Google.

Acronis, well known for its family of backup, imaging and synchronization products, will incorporate native Google Cloud Platform support for its backup, disaster recovery, and file sync and share solutions, bringing new capabilities to MSPs and their customers. The company says its partners and customers will now be able to store their data in a “significantly” higher number of Google cloud regions, bringing fast upload speeds and data-sovereignty options to users in more countries. Acronis also claims that access to Google Cloud Platform will help users reduce their recovery time objectives (RTO) and achieve service-level agreement (SLA) targets, especially when it comes to disaster-recovery solutions.

In reality, cloud support is nothing new for Acronis. The company already supports multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure and the company’s own infrastructure. However, integration with the Google Cloud Platform was one of the top requests from Acronis users, according to company president John Zanni.

“There are many businesses [that] have invested in public-cloud infrastructure. We’re making it easy for them to use it with Acronis,” he said.

John Zanni

“Acronis will grow support for Google Cloud workloads, offer a Google Cloud deployment model for the Acronis Backup management server, and enable the use of Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery,” he added.

Google will also benefit from the deal, as it gains access to thousands of Acronis partners, potentially increasing its penetration in the midmarket, the company said in a prepared statement.

“We are seeing an increasing number of customers take advantage of our storage products for data protection because they offer better flexibility, performance, and economics,” said Adam Massey, director, strategic technology partners, Google Cloud. “By partnering with Acronis, an established leader in the industry, we hope to make the customers’ data protection journey even easier.”

The partnership should also help the Google Cloud Platform garner more MSP partners and customers, making it better able to compete with cloud-services market leaders Microsoft and Amazon. According to research firm Canalys, Google’s cloud business has experienced annual growth rates of 85 percent, garnering some 8 percent of the cloud-services market. While not yet much a threat to Amazon’s 32 percent and Microsoft’s 14 percent market share, partnerships such as those with Acronis are sure to make MSPs realize they might have an alternative to turn to for future projects.

Acronis, recently launched its Acronis Data Cloud, which brings a unified management console to its partners. It’s clearly on track to bring more capabilities and options to its MSP partners, while also expanding beyond a backup company. Perhaps the Google-Acronis alliance will spawn new ideologies in storage management with integrated data protection that can create agile opportunities for MSPs willing to think outside of the traditional backup box.