Acronis SIT Autonomous Team Enters AI-Powered Roborace Championship of Autonomous Cars

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, 23 September 2020 - Schaffhausen Institute of Technology (SIT) today announced the launch of a Roborace team in partnership with the global cyber protection leader Acronis. Acronis has also announced the Official Cyber Protection Partnership with Roborace, providing easy, efficient, and secure AI-power cyber protection solutions to the world's first driverless electric racing car competition.

Acronis SIT Autonomous became the newest team to join Season Beta, a full twelve-race schedule of the 2020 Roborace Championship, initially postponed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The new season will add new excitement to the autonomous racing events, including the integration of the mixed reality world Metaverse and an update for Roborace's autonomous overtaking algorithms, further challenging teams and pushing the boundaries of autonomous mobility.

While the racing will take place on actual race tracks, during the COVID-19 travel restrictions Acronis SIT Autonomous will monitor progress remotely through the Roborace Race Control platform.

"Sport accelerates the development of mobility technologies," said Ilya Shimchik, Team Principal of Acronis SIT Autonomous Team. "We are proud to push the limits of autonomous driving with its AI and machine learning solutions designed to produce extremely accurate, calculated results. Winning in Roborace often comes down to who has the best and latest technology, and we are confident that together with Acronis we have the world-class technologies we need to compete against the best in the world."

Acronis will also provide direct support to Roborace, providing the series with a full suite of cyber protection solutions, including backup, disaster recovery, and secure file sync & share.

These cyber protection solutions are developed based on the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection: Safety, Accessibility, Privacy, Authenticity, and Security (SAPAS). This ensures that these solutions provide the highest level of safety and security to users, while ensuring that data is both tamper-free and easily accessible for smooth day-to-day operations.

One of these solutions includes Acronis Cyber Protect, an AI-powered integration of data protection and cybersecurity built to protect today's businesses and organizations from modern threats. Its capabilities include fast and reliable backup and full-stack, AI-based protection against malware, with all aspects of protection manageable from a single, easy-to-use console.

"Acronis solutions are a perfect fit for our high-speed, data-driven, and technologically-advanced race series, said Chip Pankow, Chief Championship Officer of Roborace. "Our data is of critical importance to us, and we have full confidence that the Acronis solutions will not only help us protect our data, but also help us optimize our data flow for smoother day-to-day operations."

Acronis' founder and Executive Officer, Serg Bell, said: "We're excited to be entering two new partnerships with the Roborace series. The world of AI Racing is the perfect testing ground for brand-new technologies like AI and machine learning, and we are happy to be helping the Roborace series get #CyberFit with our cutting-edge cyber protection offerings."

To find out more about Acronis SIT Autonomous, please visit https://sit.org/sit-autonomous/

To find out more about Acronis #CyberFit Sports, please visit www.acronis.sport

Acronis sets the standard for cyber protection through its innovative backup, anti-ransomware, disaster recovery, storage, and enterprise file sync and share solutions. Enhanced by its award-winning AI-based active protection technology, blockchain-based data authentication and unique hybrid-cloud architecture, Acronis protects all data in any environment - including physical, virtual, cloud, mobile workloads and applications - all at a low and predictable cost.

Founded in Singapore in 2003 and incorporated in Switzerland in 2008, Acronis now has more than 1,500 employees in 33 locations in 18 countries. Its solutions are trusted by more than 5.5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses, including 100% of the Fortune 1000 companies. Acronis' products are available through 50,000 partners and service providers in over 150 countries in more than 30 languages. Learn more at acronis.com.

ROBORACE is the world's first racing series for autonomous driving systems. It was created to accelerate the development of autonomous software by pushing the technology to its limits in a range of controlled environments, and to educate and inform the world about autonomous driving. In 2019, the series held six events that drove over 36 million multi-channel video views. Learn more at roborace.com