Acronis and Seagate: Secure, AI-powered applications and compliant data storage for MSPs

Acronis, the leader in cyber protection, and Seagate, which leads the mass-storage industry, recently announced a strategic alliance. While this partnership may seem surprising given that Acronis operates 52+ data centers globally for its backup and disaster recovery services, partners and customers who understand the current industry changes are responding with excitement. Here’s why: 

The usefulness of Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Grok is mostly determined by its first word: Large. AI gets more accurate, reliable and applicable for real-world use cases as its trained on more data and especially more parameters. 

For consumer-grade applications, maximizing data and parameters is mostly a problem of infrastructure. Tapping into the global internet of websites, social media and other public sources with petabytes of data and trillions of parameters requires world-class infrastructures accessible only to few global internet leaders, such as X, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.  

For business-grade applications it would be useful to add corporate data and perimeters to globally provided LLMs, providing the results of private business data correlated with global and public data sources. However, governments and businesses cannot commit personal identifiable information (PII) or corporate intellectual property (IP) to public data models, neither for regulatory compliance nor for commercial interests.  

To drive AI-powered innovation and outcomes, businesses need to maintain increasingly vast data sets, collecting and storing multiple times more data than before; privately, securely, compliantly, and economically. Enter the partnership of Acronis and Seagate. 

Acronis backup storage is optimized for data recovery and business continuity. Data centers are deployed close to customers worldwide, providing short backup windows, low-latency and malware-free restore, disaster recovery to cloud and native integration with user or endpoint security and management.  These characteristics are required for backup and recovery, but expensive for compliant data and file storage such as required for LMM s. 

With Acronis Archival Storage, delivered in partnership with Seagate, Acronis can now deliver economically optimized compliant storage options for large file systems, media and surveillance data, security and transaction logs with long term retention, as well as training data for AI purposes 

According to Gaidar Magdanurov, President of Acronis, "Seagate's global leadership in mass-capacity storage perfectly aligns with Acronis' goal to offer MSPs the integrated archival storage that prioritizes security, compliance, and cost efficiency." This partnership enables MSPs to maintain the vast datasets required for AI applications while ensuring data remains secure and compliant with regulatory requirements.

The Acronis-Seagate alliance represents a strategic response to the AI revolution's data demands. By combining Acronis' cyber protection expertise with Seagate's mass storage leadership, MSPs can now offer their clients the secure, compliant and cost-effective data storage foundation essential for AI innovation. As businesses increasingly rely on AI to drive growth and efficiency, this partnership ensures they can do so without compromising security or breaking compliance requirements.