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Acronis Cyber Protect moves to protect remote work environments as more of us work from home

By Ken Wong - on 8 May 2020, 3:12pm

Acronis Cyber Protect moves to protect remote work environments as more of us work from home

The dashboard of Acronis Cyber Protect at work

With the new Acronis Cyber Protect, Acronis says that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can incorporate cyber protection into their portfolio and grow their business and reduce customer churn by moving beyond basic services and delivering value to the customer with specialised security services.

MSPs are those that manage a customer's IT infrastructure and/or end-user systems, typically under a subscription model basis so that the customer can get visibility into their IT and/or support costs. Think of them as the tech support you often see being called to solve some IT issue. They can range in size from as small as five to ten staff to those in the thousands like Dimension Data which is part of the NTT Group, or NCS which Is part of Singtel. 

 

What is Acronis Cyber Protect?

Image courtesy of Acronis

Acronis calls it a single solution to deliver back-ups, anti-malware, security, and endpoint management capabilities such as vulnerability assessments, URL filtering, and patch management. Acronis says that their critical difference over competing products is that no other solution in the world has this much functionality integrated (and they say that they’ve checked).

There are other companies who do have similar products or part of what Acronis is offering. Larger end-to-end solution enterprise solution providers include Dell EMC, HPE and IBM. Smaller competitors like Veeam, Falconstor and Veritas will compete in one area. But Phil Goodwin, Research Director, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. said that Acronis is among the companies on the forefront for both integrated data protection and cyber protection.

Acronis Cyber Protect is a demonstration of the power of integration Acronis claims. It features one unified licensing model, one agent and backend, one management console, and one user interface, to improve the security posture for endpoint and edge devices. 

Features include:

  • Protection for top collaboration tools like Zoom, and Teams

  • Covid-19 fake news blocking and security alerts with URL filtering/phishing protection

  • Remote desktop connection for admins to remotely manage and wipe office machines

  • Default secure protection plan templates for remote workers, built-in VPN capability

Zoom is especially relevant as its popularity has risen over this Covid-19 period. But issues over privacy and security resulted in the company pushing out updates recently. 

This is how Acronis Cyber Protect steps in.

 

Acronis Cyber Protect and Zoom from Jonathan McCarrick on Vimeo.

They are currently offering the business version to companies through their partners with a personal version of this planned for release in the third quarter of 2020.

 

Playing with the big boys

Goodwin said that Acronis's biggest challenge will be to establish market dominance in the early stages of cyber protection and recovery market development before much larger competitors can enter and gain attention.

While calling Acronis’s solutions “advanced, differentiated technology”, Goodwin said that the company had yet to experience a "break out" moment to emerge as a market share leader in the data replication and protection market; but the investment the company had recently from Goldman Sachs could give it the resources to embark needed to compete with much larger organizations.

Goodwin concluded that IDC believes that Acronis Cyber Protect is among the most comprehensive attempts to provide data protection and cybersecurity to date.

 

Working with MSPs

This isn’t the first time that Acronis has worked with an MSP. In 2015 they announced an agreement with Comodo, a developer of cybersecurity solutions, to incorporate Acronis Backup Cloud into the Comodo ONE managed services platform (MSP).

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