Name: Cyber Disaster Recovery
Rating: 4.7 (599 reviews)

Question 1

What is Disaster Recovery (DR) in Acronis Cyber Protect?

Accepted Answer

Disaster Recovery in Acronis Cyber Protect is an integrated solution that empowers businesses to quickly resume operations in the event of a major IT disruption. This could include events like ransomware attacks, hardware failures, accidental deletions or natural disasters. Acronis DR enables you to replicate your critical systems and applications in real time or on a scheduled basis and fail over those systems to the Acronis Cloud if an outage occurs. The failover systems can be activated within minutes, enabling employees to continue working from the cloud-hosted environment while on-premises systems are restored in the background. Because DR is embedded within the Acronis Cyber Protect platform, you benefit from seamless integration with backup, cybersecurity, patch management and monitoring tools, all from a single management console.

Question 2

How is Acronis Disaster Recovery different from traditional backup?

Accepted Answer

While traditional backup is essential for recovering data after it's lost or corrupted, it doesn’t guarantee that your business services will continue running while that recovery takes place. Traditional backup usually involves restoring files or systems back onto existing infrastructure, which can take hours or even days, especially if replacement hardware is needed or if large volumes of data must be redownloaded. Acronis Disaster Recovery goes beyond this by enabling you to create and maintain ready-to-launch replicas of your critical systems in the cloud. In the event of a disruption, those replicas can be spun up immediately, allowing operations to resume almost instantly. This is especially important for businesses that can’t afford prolonged downtime, such as those in health care, finance or e-commerce. By combining backup and DR into one solution, Acronis offers a streamlined and efficient approach to resilience.

Question 3

How quickly can I recover my systems with Acronis DR?

Accepted Answer

Acronis DR is built for speed and automation, enabling organizations to recover their systems in a matter of minutes, depending on the configuration. With predefined disaster recovery runbooks — automated workflows that outline the order and steps for recovery — Acronis can orchestrate the failover of multiple systems at once, reducing manual effort and human error. Critical business services can be restored quickly in the Acronis Cloud, ensuring that your users experience minimal disruption. While recovery time objectives (RTOs) will vary based on your environment, many SMBs and mid-sized businesses can expect to achieve RTOs under one hour. This fast recovery is made possible by continuous or scheduled replication, cloud infrastructure that supports high availability, and the ability to test and optimize your DR plan in advance.

Question 4

Do I need special infrastructure to use Acronis DR?

Accepted Answer

No additional hardware or complex infrastructure is required to implement Acronis Disaster Recovery. It is a cloud-native service that runs entirely within the Acronis Cloud, making it especially appealing for small and midsized businesses without the resources to build or maintain a secondary data center. All replication, failover and management tasks are handled through the unified Acronis Cyber Protect platform. This eliminates the need to juggle multiple vendors or tools and reduces the technical burden on your IT team. You can protect physical and virtual machines, configure recovery plans, and initiate failovers directly from the same interface you use for backup and cybersecurity. This simplicity and low barrier to entry make enterprise-grade DR capabilities accessible to companies of all sizes.

Question 5

Can Acronis DR protect both physical and virtual systems?

Accepted Answer

Yes, Acronis supports a wide range of environments, making it possible to protect both physical and virtual systems. Whether your business runs on Windows or Linux physical servers, VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines, or has a combination of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure, Acronis provides a unified solution. This flexibility is crucial in modern IT environments where businesses often rely on a mix of legacy systems and newer cloud workloads. You don’t need separate tools or vendors to cover different parts of your IT estate — Acronis can replicate and recover all of it through a consistent interface. This means you can build a comprehensive and cohesive disaster recovery strategy that evolves as your infrastructure changes.

Question 6

What is automated failover, and how does Acronis handle it?

Accepted Answer

Automated failover refers to the process by which your systems and workloads are automatically transferred to a secondary environment — typically cloud-based — in the event of a failure. Acronis simplifies and streamlines this process through the use of disaster recovery runbooks. These are predefined plans that dictate exactly which systems to fail over, in what order and with what dependencies or configurations. Once a disruption is detected or declared, the system executes the runbook automatically, bringing critical services back online in the Acronis Cloud. This reduces the need for manual intervention and ensures that recovery happens quickly and consistently. In contrast to traditional disaster recovery approaches that rely heavily on IT staff following a checklist during high-stress moments, Acronis’ automated system enhances reliability, reduces recovery time and gives you greater confidence that your business can withstand an outage.

Question 7

Can I test my disaster recovery plans?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Acronis enables you to test your disaster recovery plans regularly, safely and without disrupting your live systems. DR testing is essential for verifying that your recovery runbooks are correctly configured and that failover processes will work as expected during a real incident. Acronis enables testing in isolated virtual environments, meaning your production systems remain unaffected while you validate your plan. These tests can simulate different failure scenarios and give your team the chance to practice recovery procedures. Regular testing not only boosts internal confidence in your DR strategy, but also helps meet regulatory and compliance requirements for industries where uptime and data integrity are critical. The ability to test frequently and with ease is a major advantage over traditional DR approaches that often avoid testing due to cost, complexity or risk.

Question 8

How secure is the Acronis Cloud used for disaster recovery?

Accepted Answer

Security is fundamental to Acronis’ cloud infrastructure. Data is encrypted using AES-256 both in transit and at rest, ensuring that your backups and failover environments are protected against unauthorized access. The Acronis Cloud is hosted in data centers with strict physical security controls, including biometric access, surveillance and 24/7 monitoring. In addition to data center compliance with standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR, Acronis also layers on cyber protection technologies — including anti-ransomware and vulnerability assessments — that safeguard your DR processes as well. This is critical, as recovery points and cloud replicas can themselves be targeted during sophisticated attacks. With Acronis, you can be confident that your DR plan is not only available and fast but also protected against emerging cyberthreats.

Question 9

Is Acronis DR suitable for small and midsized businesses (SMBs)?

Accepted Answer

Absolutely. Acronis Disaster Recovery is designed to be practical, scalable, and cost effective for SMBs. It delivers the kind of protection previously only accessible to large enterprises, but without the high overhead, staffing demands or expensive hardware. Because Acronis Cyber Protect integrates DR, backup, security and management into a single platform, SMBs can reduce their vendor sprawl, lower their total cost of ownership, and simplify operations. The user interface is intuitive, and the solution requires minimal ongoing maintenance, making it ideal for businesses with lean IT teams. It also scales with your growth — enabling you to add new systems, users and policies easily as your organization evolves. With Acronis, SMBs can achieve enterprise-grade resilience without enterprise-grade complexity.

Question 10

How does Acronis Disaster Recovery integrate with the rest of Acronis Cyber Protect?

Accepted Answer

Disaster recovery is a core component of the Acronis Cyber Protect platform, which brings together backup, cybersecurity, patch management and remote monitoring into a single, unified solution. This integration means you don’t have to manage multiple products or switch between interfaces to keep your systems protected. Everything is centrally managed through one console, with a single agent and a single license model. This reduces operational complexity, minimizes training needs and improves overall system performance. It also means that your DR strategy is aligned with your backup and cybersecurity strategies — so there are no blind spots or overlaps. With Acronis, you get complete cyber resilience from one vendor, optimized to work together for maximum efficiency and peace of mind.

Question 11

I'm a customer with on-premises installation, how can I get Acronis Cyber Disaster Recovery?

Accepted Answer

To start using Acronis Disaster Recovery add on, you will need to have Acronis Cyber Protect subscription license to access the management console in the Acronis Cloud. This new cloud installation will allow you to protect new systems. You will need to configure new settings accordingly (i.e., the system will not include your previous on-premises backup configurations).