Acronis Expands Backup Services with Baked-In Cyber Protections

“Traditional data backup is dead,” said founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov at this month’s Acronis Global Cyber Summit in Miami.

The company has long been known as a data backup and recovery provider. The seemingly counterintuitive statement from the CEO at the event heralded the upcoming launch of the company’s new product enhancements. While the traditional data backup scheme is increasingly succumbing to attacks such as ransomware that take out data backups too, the company’s timing on announcing an integrated data security, backup and recovery product couldn’t be better.

Acronis’ Yury Averkiev

The high view appears deceivingly simplistic given the intricacies in engineering that these upgrades required. Yury Averkiev, deputy vice president of product management at Acronis, explained in an interview that Acronis built its own AI-based antivirus (AV) program “from scratch,” rather than tack on an established product from a third-party. The company then integrated the AV with the data backup product from the ground up. Additionally, common security vulnerabilities are addressed via artificial intelligence and automation such as patch management and upgrades, and remote access and monitoring.

The company announced the following new and updated products at the event.

• Acronis Cyber Protect — integrates backup, disaster recovery, AI-based Antivirus, data authenticity certification and validation, vulnerability assessments, patch management, and remote monitoring and management.
• Acronis Cyber Platform — provides developers and ISVs the means to customize, extend and integrate Acronis products.
• Acronis Cyber Infrastructure — a hyperconverged infrastructure optimized for cyber protection deployments.

Alex Miroshichenko, vice president of infrastructure at Acronis, said in an interview that the new infrastructure is software-defined and universal given it operates on industry standards and is hardware-agnostic. The system “combines compute, software-defined network, block, file, and object storage workloads.”

Acronis just last week announced its Cyber Cloud 8.0 rollout, its new version of Acronis Cyber Cloud, to complete its new product line.

Pat Hurley, vice president and general manager, Americas, at Acronis, said the channel partner program also has been revamped. Flexibility is baked into channel partner pay to enable partners to continue to sell data backup as they previously did, and to upsell and cross-sell new product features too.

Acronis’ Pat Hurley

“MSPs can offer their customers a la carte, bundled (tiered), flat fee, user-based, and/or device and end-user pricing,” said Hurley. “That represents several ways to upsell their customer base and to attract new customers too. Plus, the margins are better now for channel partners – up to 75% margin on the cloud side – and churn rates are lower.”

Acronis products also are a brand differentiator for channel partners, Hurley said. The AI-based protections against ransomware alone are market standouts:

• AI- / ML-based techniques and behavior heuristics detect and disarm ransomware.
• Self-defense mechanisms avoid backup-file modification and disruption of Acronis software processes.
• Automatic recovery of the affected files.

“Over 200,000 ransomware attacks were prevented by our product,” said CEO Serguei Beloussov. “And that’s why I say the traditional data backup is dead. You want to prevent ransomware attacks, not suffer them and then recover later.”