The Power of Professional Data Protection

Welcome to the new Acronis.com blog! Experts from Acronis and the IT industry will regularly publish a series of posts examining important topics in data protection and secure file sharing and synchronization. The power and importance of professional protection will be a recurring theme for future business and technical discussions about secure mobility, cloud, backup, and disaster recovery in real-world hybrid environments. At Acronis, we often talk a lot about our holistic approach to intuitive, secure products. This series will explore why they’re important and what professional-grade capabilities mean to people in their personal and business lives, telling their stories of protection and recovery.

The youngest of my three sons recently learned about the importance of data protection the hard way. Matt (17) is a technology junkie and avid gamer, so he built his own PC. Unfortunately, his hard drive failed (just before I joined Acronis). Rebuilding it and reinstalling software took literally days, and he lost school files, pictures, and music. I learned the lesson with him -- now my entire family is doubly protected with TrueImage Unlimited, leveraging both a local file server and Acronis cloud storage. Dual protection is professional-grade – we’re safe even when the local server fails (and it will). By the way, Matt plans to buy a solid-state drive soon, and a full bare metal restore of his complete system image will only take a few minutes. Professional protection makes quite the difference.

That difference is seriously magnified in business where the stakes can literally be business continuity. For organizations with low tolerance for the unavailability of data and business-critical systems, that’s why we deliver disaster recovery as a service with capabilities like automated recovery plans, built-in testing, virtualization, on-premises appliances, elastic cloud storage, global cloud data centers, all configurable to suit every customer’s specific needs. Recovering a single file, a database, or an entire server is as easy as a push-of-a-button. That’s professional-grade disaster recovery, but don’t take my word for it; take a listen to Lance Rea, CIO of Davis & Gilbert, a legal firm based in New York.

Need backup for your business? Simple purpose-built tools (e.g., virtual-only backup) might like a good solution at first blush, but what happens when you need Windows, Linux or Mac OSX support? Modern data protection requires the ability to capture, store, recover, control and access data in virtual, physical, cloud and mobile environments. Additionally, organizations need the ability to migrate from virtual to virtual, virtual to physical, physical to virtual and physical to physical environments. That’s professional-grade protection.

Don’t forget, professional data protection is about more than backup and disaster recovery – it’s also about providing secure access to files and data as well. In highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, and Pharmaceuticals, organizations must protect sensitive corporate, customer and patient data while securely sharing it on employee and corporate devices. This requires sophisticated and granular policy controls for users, apps and data with full visibility with auditing capabilities – much more than a cloud file-sharing product can offer. Smaller organizations with mobile teams must have secure access to files on their desktops or laptops as well as file servers, NAS and Sharepoint from their own or corporate mobile devices. Additionally, these teams need the the ability to create and edit Microsoft Office documents, annotate PDF files, and synchronize those changes across devices.

The bottom line is that professional-grade data protection can help you save personal data, cherished memories, valuable time, even your business. I’m looking forward to reading informative articles and content on this blog and encourage you to check back regularly and to join in the conversation. Moreover, I encourage you to learn more about how to protect your own critical personal and business data. —Jeff Stiles, Acronis Chief Marketing Officer