In today’s digital world, data is the most valuable asset that your organization has. The data economy and its key driver, the democratization of data, is changing the competitive landscape everywhere. New industries are being built while traditional industries and business models are being destroyed. In addition, the amount of data and number of data sources are exploding because there are more apps, more “things”, more analysis of data, and more places to store data.
As a result, most organizations are falling way behind in their ability to manage and protect data.
Data is precious, but it can be lost and never found again. It can be stolen, lose its value, or be manipulated. And as quickly as data helps build a business, its loss threatens a company’s reputation or competitive edge.
When transforming to be a “data-driven” digital transformation success story in your market space, it’s critical to remember – your team, your partners, your investors, and your customers depend on your organization to effectively protect data from loss, theft, and manipulation.
Managing and protecting data is hard
Organizations spend a lot of money to protect data. They buy technology solutions from multiple vendors, create elaborate data protection processes, and spend a crazy amount of their budget on different data storage platforms. They also create elaborate data protection processes and controls to manage the increasing number of data sources (IoT, SaaS, Big Data Analytics). All the while, there are more compliance and regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, etc.). IT channel vendors have responded with mountains of new solutions, yet data protection coverage rarely keeps pace with innovation.
Attack surfaces are becoming much larger and more diverse. Bad actors have the same computing power – if not more – than most organizations. Governments and regulatory bodies are forcing changes to processes and deployments.
Against this backdrop, we believe now is the ideal time for Acronis to once again step forward to lead the industry. After speaking to customers, partners, industry experts, and analysts, we believe the only way to solve this problem is by opening up our platform.
Bringing cyber protection to life
Today we are launching early access to the Acronis Cyber Platform. With it, we are opening access to the APIs at the core of our platform-based architecture and, now, a platform-centric ecosystem. We believe in the power of community to solve these complex and ever growing challenges.
The six APIs and SDKs that are the foundation for the Acronis Cyber Platform are the result of years of development, experience gained from existing integrations, and a direct result of our company-wide effort to expand our go-to-market models, increasing market opportunities for Acronis and our partners.
We envision developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), service providers, and others to build solutions on the platform that will solve the use cases that their customers and users have been asking for.
For example, there will be 31 billion “things” at the edge in 2021. IoT and devices at the edge are now creating mountains of new data and new applications. Since they are new data sources, it is often a challenge to apply traditional data protection tools and technologies to them. Using the Data Sources and Data Management SDKs included in our Acronis Cyber Platform, ISVs and OEMs can embed cyber protection into their IoT devices and systems, adding a valuable new service for themselves or channel partners.
Additional Use Case Examples:
The Acronis Cyber Platform gives software developers new power to meet the needs of their organizations or customers by:
- Adding cyber protection and data backup to sources of data that are not under the control of the company using them. Developers can add cyber protection to new SaaS applications like inventory and finance systems, for example, since SaaS applications do not typically offer backup capabilities. Then the developer can ensure that backed up data is stored in a destination that meets financial or compliance requirements, storing data locally in a specific device or in a public or private cloud.
- Enabling powerful data analysis and processing from various sources. They can add features such as deep search capabilities for data created using applications that do not have “search” functionality. Or they could add custom encryption schemes to data in the platform that meet specific industry or government compliance regulations.
- Helping Acronis channel partners offer IT services to their clients by bundling solutions. They can offer customers and end-users managed services and support for cyber protection of SaaS applications (some of which were unavailable before the Acronis Cyber Platform and the Acronis Cyber Platform Marketplace).
Acronis Cyber Platform: Early Access program
Over the next several months, our Early Access platform partners and developers will get access to Acronis’ engineering, product management, support, business development, and marketing teams. We plan on supporting qualified projects at all levels, gathering feedback and preparing partners so they can launch their solutions and present their use cases at the Acronis Global Cyber Summit, which is being held in Miami on October 13-16, 2019.
At the Acronis Global Cyber Summit, we will launch the Acronis Cyber Platform as GA. Developers and organizers everywhere will then have access to a new developer portal featuring public API documentation, sample code, and the ability to sign up to join the community. The summit will also offer sessions where developers can get certified on the platform while speaking with our engineering and product management teams. Learn more about the Acronis Cyber Platform here.
About Acronis
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses.