Acronis CyberFit Summit: More Women, Diversity Needed in Cybersecurity
Acronis also unveiled updates to its Cyber Protect Cloud platform
![Acronis CyberFit Day 2 Acronis CyberFit Day 2](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt08ee4730c75f6180/652410dc66aecd6dd46cd7de/Acronis-CyberFit-Day-2.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shown left to right: Claire Jedrek (moderator), Tery Howard, Ashley Taylor. TYpe Hayes and Amy Babinchak.
Offering and supporting a flexible workplace will help encourage more women to seek and retain careers in cybersecurity, said Peer Vision Consulting’s Tery Howard.
“I’ve been in sports for 30-plus years and for women there’s a lot of balance that we have to work through,” she said. “In my career, I always focused on commitment, integrity and balance.”
It’s important for staff, leadership and the executive team to support women’s professional and personal commitments, while at the same time allowing continued growth, Howard said.
N-Ovate‘s Tye Hayes said she leads by example.
“For me, it’s building that balance into what I do and showing young women that it is hard, but you can do it,” she said “It’s also creating structures that are meant for you to be successful.”
Hayes also said when hiring, she considers non-IT specific people.
“I can always teach them cyber,” she said. “We need to make sure women don’t need to be a man to be in IT. They don’t need to do what a man does.”
Howard said women new to cybersecurity need to know failure is an option.
“You must fail, everyone fails,” she said. “It’s accepting that, owning it and then how you manage that failure, correct it and move forward.”
Acronis‘ Ashley Taylor said for women, the tech industry “is your oyster.”
“There’s tons of opportunity … but you need to take control of your career,” she said. “It’s also taking that leap for that next promotion.”
Unlike men, women can tend to be hesitant about pursuing promotions, believing their not ready or qualified, Taylor said.
Also during CyberFit, Acronis unveiled strategic updates to its Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud platform with a new product, Advanced Automation, and developments including the addition of machine intelligence (MI) to its Advanced Management solution.
Together, this expansion of the Acronis lineup will help MSPs reduce complexity, stay focused on value-based service delivery, and provide the tools needed to ensure client businesses and their systems, data and applications are up and running.
With the updates and the recent release of the Acronis Cyber Scripting solution, MSPs will now have access to an endpoint management solution that provides:
MI-based remote monitoring for continuous anomaly detection that is automated, adaptive and doesn’t require manual threshold setting.
Fail-safe patch management via rollback from automated backups in the event a patch fails.
Multi-vendor, prediction-based hard drive health monitoring.
Several remote desktop developments that allow performance over slow networks, both user and admin initiation, and added platform support for MacOS and Linux.
Enhanced security protections on remote desktop and cyber scripting employing two-factor authentication (2FA) and a new protocol using two-way advanced encryption standard (AES) to prevent management tools from opening new vulnerabilities.
These new capabilities work in combination with the broader Acronis platform that spans across security, backup and disaster recovery products.
Shown left to right: Jay McBain, Cameron May, Kate Bissinger, Amanda Lee and Roli Points.
A CyberFit panel focused on what successful MSPs are doing now to keep growing.
Jay McBain, Canalys’ chief analyst for global channels, said a new Canalys survey shows more than 50% of MSPs are increasing marketing spending, and are looking to power their way through recession and come out stronger.
Cameron May, chief strategist at Silvereye Technologies, said MSPs want to grow and “you can’t grow by cutting.”
“The first step is give up everything that’s not working,” he said. “Give up on activities you don’t want to bet on anymore. You’re not going to let this distract you anymore.”
Amanda Lee, corporate vice president of global communications at Pax8, said she sees a lot of businesses thriving when they focus on culture. Creating an atmosphere where employees want to go to work and say it’s a great place is important.
Kate Bissinger, marketing director at Net3 Technology, said sales and marketing should be working as a team. In addition, “don’t suffer from analysis paralysis, make a decision, look at what you can do and make a decision.’
“Just go try it out, ” she said. “If it fails, try something else.”
Harry Mcfadden owns HLM Computer Solutions, an MSP in Columbia, South Carolina. He said the keynotes focusing on upcoming trends “keeps us knowledgeable on what’s coming down the pike and what we need to look out for.”
“Also, the CEO and the owner of the company, they’re just phenomenal and they keep us abreast of everything,” he said. “In my business, they’re definitely helping me, like with the partner portal. I learned a lot today that will make my business even better.”
Terry Parise is customer success coordinator at Datasmith Network Solutions, an MSP in Walpole, Massachusetts.
“We’re a new partner with Acronis, so we’re just starting out with deployments and things like that,” she said. “This was new for me to come in and sort of gather some information, and I’ll bring it back to my team. I hope to have backup and disaster recovery for all of our clients. That’s something that we take very seriously and make sure that we always have our clients’ best interest and never have anything go wrong.”
Justine Ulmer is IT services director at UpTime OnTime, a San Diego-based MSP. She said the keynotes were informative.
“They’re hitting on the aging population of this industry and where that’s going to become a challenge of not wanting to take those 2 a.m. calls anymore,” she said. “We’re curious to see kind of where it goes because most of us have been in this for 20 years and eventually are looking for our exit sign, but there’s not a lot of talent out there to backfill it. So it’s interesting to see the way people are innovating to meet that need, whether it’s outsourcing to other companies or partnering with people like Acronis. But overall, it’s an amazing conference.”
Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller said partners should take back home with them three things from CyberFit.
“I think first, we really protect you from all the angles you need protection from for your end customer,” he said. “Second, we are and will always sell together with our service partners or through our service partners. So we are very much dedicated on the channel. We are 100% dedicated on the channel and we will be dedicated on the channel. And third, the combination between cybersecurity and data protection is the best way to truly protect your end customer from all potential threats because there’s not only cyber threats. Let’s be honest, we always talk about cyber threats, but hardware still breaks, hardware is still being stolen, forgotten or something else. So there are many, many other things which happen. And our solution really protects you from all of the events.”
Acronis also handed out its CyberFit Partner Awards aimed at recognizing “overachievers” from across the globe.
The winners include:
Loyalty Award — IronTree
Exceptional Marketing Recognition Award — Pax8
Cloud Transformation Award — Esy World
Cyber Platform Partner Award — Perception Point
New Partner Award — LM Cloud
Regional partner awards include:
Service Provider of the Year, United States — Hub Tech
Service Provider of the Year, Canada — Sherweb
Service Provider of the Year, Latin America — Algar Telecom and Claro
Service Provider of the Year, Northern Europe — Intelligent Performance
Service Provider of the Year, Southern Europe — interworks.cloud
Service Provider of the Year, DACH — Sigmavista IT Consulting
Service Provider of the Year, Middle East and Africa — Dataguardnxt and Tech Wise Solutions
Service Provider of the Year, Japan — Fujitsu
Service Provider of the Year, APAC — Cloudable
Acronis Partner Award for Service Provider of the Year — Reline IT Solutions
Regional distributor awards include:
Distributor of the Year, United States — Ingram Micro Cloud
Distributor of the Year, Canada — IT Cloud.ca
Distributor of the Year, Latin America — Stock and Licencias Online
Distributor of the Year, Northern Europe — Ingram Micro UK
Distributor of the Year, Southern Europe — Tech Data France
Distributor of the Year, DACH — Alltron AG
Distributor of the Year, Middle East and Africa — Rectron
Distributor of the Year APAC — Leader
And ConnectWise received the CyberFit Innovation Award.
Acronis also handed out its CyberFit Partner Awards aimed at recognizing “overachievers” from across the globe.
The winners include:
Loyalty Award — IronTree
Exceptional Marketing Recognition Award — Pax8
Cloud Transformation Award — Esy World
Cyber Platform Partner Award — Perception Point
New Partner Award — LM Cloud
Regional partner awards include:
Service Provider of the Year, United States — Hub Tech
Service Provider of the Year, Canada — Sherweb
Service Provider of the Year, Latin America — Algar Telecom and Claro
Service Provider of the Year, Northern Europe — Intelligent Performance
Service Provider of the Year, Southern Europe — interworks.cloud
Service Provider of the Year, DACH — Sigmavista IT Consulting
Service Provider of the Year, Middle East and Africa — Dataguardnxt and Tech Wise Solutions
Service Provider of the Year, Japan — Fujitsu
Service Provider of the Year, APAC — Cloudable
Acronis Partner Award for Service Provider of the Year — Reline IT Solutions
Regional distributor awards include:
Distributor of the Year, United States — Ingram Micro Cloud
Distributor of the Year, Canada — IT Cloud.ca
Distributor of the Year, Latin America — Stock and Licencias Online
Distributor of the Year, Northern Europe — Ingram Micro UK
Distributor of the Year, Southern Europe — Tech Data France
Distributor of the Year, DACH — Alltron AG
Distributor of the Year, Middle East and Africa — Rectron
Distributor of the Year APAC — Leader
And ConnectWise received the CyberFit Innovation Award.
An Acronis CyberFit Summit 2022 panel on Tuesday focused on the need for more women and diversity in the global cybersecurity industry.
The “#CyberWomen — What’s Next?” panel kicked off day 2 of Acronis CyberFit Summit in Miami. The theme of the conference is “cyber protect the future.”
Aliona Geckler (shown above onstage) is senior vice president and chief of staff at Acronis. She said Acronis launched a diversity program this year. The three pillars of the program include mentoring, regional meet ups, and internal and external events.
“At Acronis, we take diversity very seriously,” she said.
The panel included:
Tery Howard, founder and CEO of Peer Vision Consulting, and former senior vice president and CIO of the Miami Dolphins.
Tye Hayes, founder and CEO of N-Ovate Business Solutions.
Ashley Taylor, head of talent acquisition at Acronis.
Amy Babinchak, president of the board, National Society of IT Solution Providers (NSITSP).
Taylor said encouraging more women in tech isn’t just for women, but for everyone.
“It’s really important that you’re an active participant and we do it together,” she said.
‘Tons’ of Reasons for Women to be in Cybersecurity
There’s “tons” of important reasons for women to be in cybersecurity, Taylor said. First, diversity and inclusion increases innovation, productivity and profitability.
“Second, we really need more role models, mentors and peers to provide support for those currently in the space because there’s a big retention problem,” she said.
In addition, as the need for cyber talent continues growing, talent can’t keep up, Taylor said. Women make up half of the workforce and can be a “driving force” in cybersecurity.
Babinchak said women may be unfairly passed over during the recruitment process. That’s because they can approach the application and interview process differently from men, and therefore are discounted by recruiters.
In addition, women can be prone to “imposter syndrome,” she said. They may omit experience from their resume if they don’t feel 100% qualified, while men will include the experience even if they are less qualified.
“We see a lot of women enter and then exit the industry, so that shows they’re not satisfied,” Babinchak said. “So to women and men, support continuing education. There’s a lot of job satisfaction in continually learning. Bring the women in your business to these conferences. We need to bring women forward, bring them to conferences and include them.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from day 2 of Acronis CyberFit.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Edward Gately or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like