Acronis Unveils New Data Protection Platform

Data protection vendor Acronis is looking to help enterprises provide complete protection for data with the Acronis Data Protection Platform, which includes backup, disaster recovery and secure file sync and share solutions.

The launch of the Acronis Data Protection Platform stems from an industrywide need for an all-inclusive data recovery solution, said John Zanni, senior vice president of Cloud and Hosting Sales at Acronis. The company recently launched its Acronis Backup Service, but service providers have continued to clamor for a more extensive solution.

“What we’ve learned while working with these service providers is that they wanted more than just a backup solution,” said Zanni in an interview with The VAR Guy. “They wanted a complete data protection platform to offer to their customers.”

The new data protection platform is designed to enable partners capitalize on the growing need for cloud data protection services as companies continue to move their data from on-premise storage to the public, private and hybrid cloud.

Partners have two options for reselling the Acronis Data Protection Platform to provide for additional flexibility. Resellers can either opt for a pure resell mode, with Acronis in charge of hosting and running the platform, or they can host the service themselves and create a differentiated offering for their customers.

“Our goal here and the reason we’re working through channel … is so that it becomes easy for businesses to buy these services through the trusted advisers that they bought from in the past,” he said. “There are many solutions on the market but most of them are point solutions and not very complete, and in some cases not very easy to use. [Channel partners] should be excited because now we have a solution that is one of the most complete in the market, one of the easiest to use and can be sold by channel partners in one of two methods.”

Included in the Data Protection Platform are several different solutions, including a new version of Acronis Backup Cloud as well as Acronis Files Cloud, a secure sync and share alternative to Dropbox. Customers looking to protect and back up their files can utilize the Acronis Disaster Recovery Service.

With the Acronis Backup Cloud, users will have expanded support for Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange and Mac OS X environments, according to the announcement. Seeding capabilities will allow users to move data volumes to the cloud, and local backup recovery will let users recover information directly from a centralized management console.

Acronis Files Cloud is the company’s answer to competing file sync and share solutions, and is expected to provide users with secure cloud service to protect and allow access to files from anywhere, at anytime. Acronis Files Cloud is expected to launch in August in the United States, the United Kingdom and select other markets, with additional language support planned to roll out before the end of the year.

Finally, the global launch of Acronis Disaster Recovery Service is expected to provide users with an all-inclusive hybrid cloud solution for backup and disaster recovery. Acronis said the solution will focus on addressing both recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives to help reduced downtime and data loss by as much as possible.

The platform will support nearly all of the major systems in the market, including XEN, Linux, Docker, Open-Xchange and MySQL, as well as Windows, Mac, Hyper-V, VMware and Exhange, among others. Partners will have the ability to scale out the solution as they see fit with the platform’s automation features.