Considering the business opportunities on the horizon for cloud-based service providers, it’s no wonder there’s been an explosion of new competitors entering the market. After all, when Gartner projects revenues from public cloud services will jump 62.3 percent in the next three years, a lot of johnny-come-latelies will try cashing in – flooding the market with competition. Cloud service providers looking to differentiate their portfolio must offer solutions built for the business needs of today and the future.

There’s no doubt businesses increasingly view the cloud as an agile, efficient way to manage their IT needs: 58 percent are moving toward a hybrid IT environment and another 18 percent are looking to move completely to the cloud (per 451 Research). This means that managed service providers (MSPs) need the right tools to stay in the game – and ahead of the competition – to facilitate this process for customers and capture some of the projected $186.4 billion cloud computing market. Next week at CloudFest 2019, Acronis will join 7,000 global cloud, hosting, and service provider industry pros to share IT solutions that enable MSPs to solve pressing, complex customer problems. Here’s a preview of what will be top-of-mind at Acronis’ CloudFest booth #F04.

Nearly every week during the past few years has featured a headline about the latest data breach, malware attack, ransomware demand, or unrecoverable corporate data loss. Those stories are frequently followed by news that the CEOs at those high-profile companies were forced to resign. Security concerns have become a critical business problem, yet they are still handled as a technical problem – mainly by IT departments. Thankfully, many organizations have started bringing together IT executives and non-IT leadership together to reshape their approach towards security concerns. CEOs need to know what they should worry about when it comes to protecting the company’s data against cybercriminals and malware – and there are plenty of high-profile examples they can learn from.

These are exciting times of change in almost every industry, vertical, use case, and inside almost every team. From accounting and HR, to sales and marketing, to the manufacturing line and warehouse inventory systems, everything is being instrumented and data is being captured and analyzed. The popular saying “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is on the verge of being abused. Several Acronis team members and I just spent the day at IDC Directions 2019. It’s a yearly event where the IDC community of analysts meets with clients, presenting high-level summaries of their research and sharing their thoughts about where technology is heading and what we and our organizations can do prepare for the future rushing towards us. And that is a good thing.