The Gately Report: Acronis Says More Vendor Integrations Needed to Fight Cyber Crime

The most dangerous thing about the current threat landscape is the lack of vendor integrations and many vendors remain separated from one another.

Acronis' James Abercrombie

That’s according to James Abercrombie, Acronis’ CyberApp developer advocate. We caught up with him at last week’s IT Nation Connect. Acronis has a partnership with ConnectWise.

“The fact is that we are here at IT Nation, this is a channel event, and there are a lot of vendors here that do not work together and do not want to play nice together,” he said. “We are not ever going to get out of this without unification. We have to work together. We have to. We have to team up. We have to make it so that if there is a gap, it is covered elsewhere. And that's what I would say.”

Integrating Vendor Technologies 'Best Way'

Acronis came to the realization that it’s best to work together by understanding “how many technologies are out there that do things that we don't do now,” Abercrombie said.

"We have a great team of developers, a great team of scientists,” he said. “They can build whatever we need. But does it make sense to invest into that when somebody has already built a really good wheel? Why not partner with them? So is there a defining moment that changed us from not wanting to work with others, to wanting to work with others. not while I've been here.”

Acronis already has initiated various integrations where "we invested our time to build this to make it a little bit better for the MSP community,” Abercrombie said.

“I think the real defining moment was seeing how much time it takes to build those integrations and wanting to make it easier, not only for the MSPs, but also for us," he said. "And that's how we entered this whole CyberApp Standard. So by leveraging this, we said look, we can actually integrate with anybody. If you've got a cloud application, let's get it extended into Acronis and get you out there, which you may see morph into something different in the coming years.”