Acronis Cyber Protect Local: Enabling OT resilience for manufacturers

One thing is certain for manufacturers: Cyberattacks on your operations will succeed. Improving detection and prevention capabilities is critical, but at some point, your operational technology (OT) environment will face a significant incident. What matters most is how quickly you can recover and resume operations.

The SANS Institute’s 2025 State of ICS/OT Cybersecurity Survey reveals that while detection capabilities are improving, manufacturers remain dangerously unprepared for the realities of operational disruption and prolonged recovery. More than 20% of industrial organizations reported a cybersecurity incident in the past year, with nearly 20% of those incidents taking over a month to remediate and 3.2% taking over a year to fully recover.

Acronis Cyber Protect Local addresses the critical resilience gap identified in the SANS survey by delivering what manufacturers need most: The ability to recover operations rapidly, reliably and without requiring specialized on-site IT expertise.

In air-gapped manufacturing environments, traditional recovery in air-gapped manufacturing environments can take days or weeks. IT teams must travel to the site, diagnose issues and restore systems manually. In remote locations, delays are even longer. Acronis Cyber Protect Local changes this with One-Click Recovery, enabling any authorized local operator to restore systems in minutes — without IT expertise.

This capability is purpose-built for the realities of modern manufacturing:

• Complete system restoration: Full bare-metal recovery to dissimilar hardware with a single click.
• Minimal downtime: Recovery measured in minutes, not days — drastically reducing the financial impact of incidents.
• No IT dependency: Local technicians can restore operations without waiting for remote IT support or on-site visits.
• Air-gap compatible: Designed specifically for isolated production environments where remote access isn't possible.

Unlike point solutions that create complexity and integration challenges, Acronis Cyber Protect Local delivers cybersecurity, data protection and disaster recovery in a single natively integrated platform.

This unified approach means:

• No integration overhead: All capabilities work together seamlessly without custom connectors or middleware.
• Consistent protection: The same engine protects SCADA systems, HMIs, operational historians, and engineering workstations.
• Simplified management: Single console for backup, recovery, threat detection and patch management.
• Optimized for OT: Features designed specifically for industrial environments, including flexible scheduling, event-triggered backups and support for legacy systems.

Acronis Cyber Protect Local addresses the specific challenges identified in the SANS survey:

• Incremental and differential backups minimize storage overhead.
• Event-triggered backups capture critical state changes automatically.
• Multiple destination options: local drives, network storage, private clouds or Acronis cloud storage.
• Automatic cloud replication for geographic redundancy.

• Automated patching and updates that don't interrupt operations.
• AI-powered threat detection that identifies anomalous behavior across IT and OT systems.
• Configuration management that maintains system state and enables quick rollback.

• Centralized monitoring and reporting for frameworks like IEC 62443 and NIS 2.
• Integrated logging across IT and OT environments.
• Audit-ready documentation and evidence collection.

Acronis Cyber Protect is widely deployed in manufacturing OT environments and is frequently white-labeled or co-branded by leading automation vendors who recognize its reliability and effectiveness.

This resilience isn’t theoretical. Nicolas Jacobus Els, Technical Operations Manager at Digital Industries (Sasol), spoke of the power of Acronis Cyber Protect Local: "The seamless and reliable backup and recovery solutions offered by Acronis not only ensured the safety of our critical data, but also improved our overall business continuity."

True cyber resilience means accepting that perfect prevention is impossible and investing in rapid, reliable recovery. It means bridging IT security and OT operational continuity so that when an incident occurs, any authorized operator can restore operations with a single click.

The SANS survey data shows that only 14.2% of organizations feel fully prepared for emerging threats. Don't wait until your organization joins the 21.5% that suffered an incident in the past year or the 3.2% that took over a year to recover.

Find out how Acronis Cyber Protect Local can help your organization achieve true cyber resilience and protect what matters most: operational continuity, worker safety and business viability in an increasingly hostile threat environment.

Download the SANS report to learn more.

Report

SANS Institute State of ICS/OT Cybersecurity Survey