Acronis CyberFit Conference: New CEO Pledges Support to MSPs, Partners
Acronis is adding cloud locations globally.
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Acronis is assembling all the features partners need to connect with the company, including direct traffic and direct port connections, Patrick Pulvermueller said.
“We are really able and will be able to provide you all these different features, and the right people are in the room to have some one-to-one discussions with many of you on what you also aspire for us to provide you. We’re here to serve you to provide you the solutions you need to be successful.”
Pulvermueller said Acronis partners who have completed training are earning more than those who haven’t.
“If you haven’t logged onto the partner portal recently, I strongly suggest you do so,” he said. “It’s really worth it. And they’re continuously increasing the repository, obviously in multiple languages.”
Specialized training from the Acronis CyberFit Academy, including product training, technical certifications and more, can be accessed directly through the partner portal.
“Partners who went through the academy and experienced the training material on average achieve 103% more revenue,” Pulvermueller said. “So whoever has not signed up there yet, it is truly worth it.”
Scale Computing and Acronis partnered closely on the integrated technology powering the Business Resilience System (BRS) appliance for MSPs. Providers can back up VMware, Hyper-V, Scale Computing HC3 or even physical workloads and endpoints.
Jeff Ready is Scale Computing’s CEO and co-founder.
“Scale Computing has a strong reputation for delivering organizations resiliency for their operations,” he said. “The Business Resilience System for MSPs, purpose built for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, takes this to another level by giving MSPs everything they need to protect their clients from downtime, lost revenue and fallout from cyberattacks. The BRS for MSPs hybrid cloud solution will help service providers increase revenue through better service levels and new services.”
Candid Wüest is Acronis’ vice president of cybersecurity research. He said as evidenced by recent attacks like Kaseya, service providers have a “crosshair on their backs at the moment.”
“Attackers know that they are a very nice and juicy target because once they’re in, they can go through all their customers,” he said. “Originally for the Kaseya REvil breach, they asked for $70 million U.S. dollars for the decryption key. They got it down to $50 million and in the end the key was available for free, but only after two weeks. The question is can you wait for two weeks with your business not being operational? I highly doubt it.”
Acronis Cyber Protect blocked this attack without any updates needed, Wüest said.
As of Monday, more than 16,000 vulnerabilities have been released to the public, he said. Not all of them are critical, “but some definitely are.”
“It’s not a matter of it you get attacked; it’s a matter of when,” Wüest said. “And you probably already have been attacked; it’s just a question of if you noticed. With ransomware, you probably did because that’s something that’s very noisy. But if they steal your customer data base, if they steal your passwords, you might not notice until it’s actually too late. So it’s absolutely crucial that you protect yourself.”
New research conducted by VansonBourne shows consolidating and integrating cybersecurity, backup and disaster recovery services on average produces nearly $230,000 in savings for MSPs, and reduces the time required to recover from a breach or data loss incident by an average of five hours.
The survey of 400 MSPs was released in conjunction with Acronis Cyberfit. It delves into the biggest challenges and opportunities that MSPs face when providing cybersecurity, backup and disaster recovery (DR) services.
Given the recent flurry of supply-chain attacks seen in the MSP industry, it’s not surprising 96% of MSPs are concerned about suffering a cybersecurity breach in the next 12 months.
Forty-nine percent of MSPs said their clients do not completely trust the security of the services their organization provides, while 53% do not completely trust the vendors they use to provide cybersecurity services.
To combat this sense of vulnerability, many MSPs have added additional tools to their technology stack. MSPs use on average four vendors to provide cybersecurity, backup and/or DR services, with 30% using more than five vendors.
MSPs also report that their clients use an average of 14 SaaS tools. That’s consistent with recent Acronis end-user research.
However, MSPs also report only managing an average of 58% of their clients’ SaaS tools, with only 3% indicating they manage 100%. This discrepancy results in greater vulnerabilities for clients as SaaS data is not being properly protected and the MSPs have limited visibility into these environments.
There is big potential for growth for service providers if they can prove to their clients that there are benefits to them managing the licenses, onboarding, security and performance of these SaaS applications. MSPs say the biggest obstacles to managing more of their clients’ SaaS tools are not having the right relationships with line-of-business decision makers (44%), not having the right tools (41%), and a lack of trust (39%).
A trend is emerging of consolidating vendors, as well as more tightly integrating existing vendors with workflows. Those MSPs which are successful in these efforts will have a material advantage over their competition.
Also during the conference, Acronis handed out its latest CyberFit Partner Awards celebrating partners and their achievements over the last year.
The winners are as follows:
Innovation Award: IT Practice
Loyalty Award: ELBO Computing Resources
Exceptional Marketing Recognition Award: US Signal
New Partner Award: Old Town Computers
Community Award: Mapletronics
Cloud Distributor: Pax8
Service Provider: Ubistor
Distributor: Climb Channel Solutions
Cloud Transformation: GHA Technologies
Cyber Platform Partner: Ingram Micro
Also during the conference, Acronis handed out its latest CyberFit Partner Awards celebrating partners and their achievements over the last year.
The winners are as follows:
Innovation Award: IT Practice
Loyalty Award: ELBO Computing Resources
Exceptional Marketing Recognition Award: US Signal
New Partner Award: Old Town Computers
Community Award: Mapletronics
Cloud Distributor: Pax8
Service Provider: Ubistor
Distributor: Climb Channel Solutions
Cloud Transformation: GHA Technologies
Cyber Platform Partner: Ingram Micro
On Monday, Acronis kicked off CyberFit Summit, its first live conference since the start of the pandemic, with the unveiling of the Business Resilience System (BRS) for MSPs, and new research on MSPs and cybersecurity.
Acronis Cyberfit Summit is taking place both in person in Miami, Florida, and virtually. Acronis and Scale Computing announced BRS, an appliance that allows for instant recovery of all critical workloads in an environment, regardless of where those workloads are running.
Patrick Pulvermueller is Acronis’ new CEO. In July, he left his position as president of GoDaddy’s partners business to lead Acronis.
Acronis’ Patrick Pulvermueller
“I’ve been in the service provider industry for over 20 years,” he said. “The world has changed a lot since that time. But two things have not changed. My passion to serve you and all other customers best, and Acronis’ focus on you, the service providers, to protect all of your end customers’ data, applications and systems, which is especially important in today’s world where we’re experiencing a significant increase in cybercrime by more than 300% and at an ever-increasing pace.”
Investing in R&D, Cloud Capabilities
At the Acronis conference, Pulvermueller said the company is significantly investing and will continue to invest in research and development in support of its cloud capabilities to protect service providers and their end customers from any threats out there “today or tomorrow, no matter where you or your customers might be in this world.”
All businesses are under mounting pressure to digitize, he said. This creates more productivity, and it makes the world more sustainable. However, these businesses are all exposed to more complexity, and they’re exposed to more cyber threats. To make things more challenging for the end customers, they’re also really struggling to find and retain the right talent to protect them.
“This is the reason why they are more and more looking at all of you for help, advice and protection,” Pulvermueller said. “And we’re here to help you to protect the end customers. We are offering the best localized solution around the world. Today already, we offer you our solution in 26 different languages. This makes it most comfortable for your employees to pick and choose whatever language they might prefer. But it’s also important for your end customers to receive the report in the language they are most comfortable with.”
Increasing Cloud Locations
Acronis is making it easier for partners to use its tools and services by further integrating with platforms and vendors, and the company is planning more integrations, Pulvermueller said.
“In order for you to be able to support your customers anywhere around this world, we have built over 38 different cloud locations already,” he said. “Just in the last 12 months, we added 14 locations to this map, and we continue to add more and more. This allows you not to worry about items like data sovereignty or regulatory items because you can always keep the data in the region where your customers and clients’ workloads might be that you want to protect.”
Acronis this month is launching its Cyber Network initiative in the United States, Pulvermueller said.
“By this, we will get to hundreds of locations over the course of the next one or two years because we really want to be very, very close,” Pulvermueller said. “This will also allow us to provide you with a significant performance boost. And obviously, we are not only providing you this one platform, we are also connecting with all key cloud providers out in the world directly. So whatever data your end customers might have on some other clouds, we can directly connect and have the best performance possible to protect all the data, applications and systems.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more highlights from the Acronis conference.
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