At the Acronis #CyberFit Summit 2022
By Yury Averkiev, VP of Product Management, Acronis
This year’s Acronis #CyberFit Summit 2022, “Cyber Protect the Future,” offers a full, engaging schedule with keynotes from our leadership team and several high-profile guest speakers including basketball legend Magic Johnson and former FBI Director Judge Louis Freeh.
We’ll also feature a “Winning with Innovation” track that starts with our Monday Roadmap 2023: A look into the future of cyber protection session. This session will review important Acronis developments over this past year and offer insights into what’s coming next from us.
But whether you are here with us in person, following us online for live updates, or planning to check back for recorded sessions, we'd like to share some top takeaways from our keynote presentations and roadmap session here.
Cyber protection in 2022 — a retrospective
In many ways, the 2022 IT landscape for managed service providers (MSPs) and their customers offered four familiar themes — ones that are sure to continue into 2023:
1. IT is always increasing in importance to keep businesses secure, up, running and productive across an expanded set of systems and online services — accessed by a highly global, mobile and virtual-office-distributed workforce.
2. The threat landscape becomes more sophisticated every year with bad actors able to attack businesses of all sizes by using easy access to malicious tools, automation to attack at scale, a growing distributed ‘workforce’ too, and an exponential number of attack surfaces created by increases in online services.
3. The global regulatory environment is now vastly more complex for data privacy and protection with international, national, and state and local laws in flux such as with this year’s announcement of the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework to replace Privacy Shield.
4. Skilled IT staff continues to have a serious supply vs. demand problem, with challenges of finding talent against a growing knowledge gap while adding pressure on the existing workforce, making automated IT productivity tools to scale valuable personnel resources more important than ever.
What we’ve delivered
In response to this environment and to deliver on our commitments, Acronis has introduced several advances to ensure we continue to offer the best cyber protection in the industry. Here are some of the high points:
· New security product with a new approach to data loss prevention — Acronis Advanced DLP. Released in September, this solution helps MSPs prevent customer data leakage against both insider risk and external threats by automating data classification, policy creation, and monitoring with active response options and out-of-box compliance templates to protect sensitive data in a way that MSPs can successfully deploy and manage across multiple customers.
· Innovations in backup and disaster recovery, including immutable storage, improved M365 protection and mass endpoint recovery. While enhancements to storage protection with more control over deletion and two-factor authentication (2FA) builds on our pervasive security features, the one-click recovery is a must-have feature to enable rapid, mass recovery from disasters like ransomware, with an option to allow end users to self-service themselves back online.
· More integrations for better solutions. Acronis has significantly increased the number of joint solutions we now offer to our partners, and have also just updated the technology program to make it easier for partners to customize and collaborate with us. You can see the results of this investment by browsing our updated (and console integrated) joint solutions portal at https://solutions.acronis.com.
· Momentum in our regional presence and better tools for partners. Acronis is now up to 52 data centers worldwide to offer local options for MSP services that need to meet compliance challenges like data residency.
· We also added Acronis Cyber Scripting to Advanced Management to help you automate repetitive management tasks to offer more service at less cost.
What we’re announcing now
Today, live from our Summit event, we’re making three major product announcements:
· New product — Acronis Advanced Security + EDR. For MSPs and customers concerned with time to detect and recover from cybersecurity attacks, our new EDR solution is built for MSPs and includes simplified investigation with MITRE ATT&CK® chain mapping, human-friendly interpretation, event correlation and remediation capabilities with a wide range of recovery options because of tight integration with our backup, security, and management solutions, all at an affordable cost. MSPs can request to join the Early Access Program (EAP) that starts in December.
· New product — Acronis Advanced Automation. To stay competitive and profitable, our MSP partners need to better ticket, track, deliver, invoice and report on Acronis consumption-based services. With native integration with other Acronis services, we eliminate the MSP business automation headaches like manual back-office synchronization of contract data, technical staff tasks, and consumption-based billing — boosting the efficiency of your daily business operations. Coming in Q1 2023, this new product offers comprehensive business automation capabilities natively in our platform.
· Important updates — Acronis Advanced Management. We know that businesses want to focus on what matters most — their businesses. With our recent Acronis Cyber Scripting feature release, upcoming Remote Desktop update (December 21) and machine intelligence-based monitoring on the way (Q1 2023), Acronis can now offer MSPs and customers a broader toolset to stay up and running, safe and secure.
What’s coming next
During my live session in Miami, I’ll be covering a lot more detail on what we have in progress, and you’ll see announcing today and over the coming months into 2023.
But the highlights of what to expect include:
· Continued investment and focus on the platform, and on our data center, compute, storage and network services. We are accelerating our deployment of regional, local points-of-presence to offer highly competitive performance, geo-redundancy, availability, and ability to meet compliance requirements, while ensuring that our platform is not only fully extensible, but also more accessible for customization and joint development projects.
· More innovation into our backup, disaster recover, security and management products. We will continue to increase both our automation and machine intelligence-based capabilities across our platform and products to help service providers and customers benefit from effective solutions that are also efficient.
· Continue a strong focus on quality and operational enablement for our partners. Beyond our upcoming release of Advanced Automation that will offer dramatic improvements on the delivery of Acronis-based services and customer experience, we’ll also be enhancing use of our portals, support, and in-product notifications.
Having cyber protection in the future means preparing and taking steps today. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we continue to work to offer the best cyber protection in the industry, with the tools to help service providers deliver it.
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.