Closing the execution gap: How Acronis supports MSPs in implementing Winter SHIELD controls

Across the SMB market, security failures are rarely caused by a lack of guidance. MSPs and their customers already know about phishing, unpatched systems, ransomware and backups. The real challenge is execution at scale. Controls are deployed inconsistently, exceptions accumulate, legacy systems persist and critical tasks such as patching, backup testing and access reviews often fall behind daily operations.

Attackers take advantage of that gap. They rarely need zero‑day exploits when known vulnerabilities remain unpatched, or advanced tooling when email‑based attacks continue to succeed. And they don’t need to destroy everything if backups are reachable, untested or poorly protected. This is the reality MSPs and SMBs operate in: not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of consistent, enforceable implementation.

Operation Winter SHIELD is an FBI Cyber Division initiative designed to narrow that execution gap. Instead of publishing another long list of theoretical best practices, the FBI distilled ten concrete actions that repeatedly show up as missing or weak in real investigations. The goal is simple: reduce the likelihood of compromise and limit damage when incidents occur by focusing on controls that matter most in practice, not on paper.

Winter SHIELD is not about perfection. It’s about raising the baseline across organizations by making sure fundamentals are actually in place — consistently and defensibly. That makes it especially relevant for MSPs and SMBs, where limited staff and tool sprawl often make “doing the basics well” harder than it should be.

SMBs make up a large portion of the economy and are frequent targets precisely because they tend to have fewer resources and less margin for error. MSPs sit at the center of this ecosystem. They’re expected to deliver enterprise-grade resilience across many customers, often with small teams and tight operational budgets.

That puts MSPs in a unique position. When they standardize security operations, dozens or hundreds of SMBs benefit immediately. When execution breaks down, those gaps repeat across tenants, increasing systemic risk. Winter SHIELD’s focus on a small number of high-impact actions integrates closely with how MSPs already think: standardize, automate and prove outcomes.

This is where Acronis fits into the picture.

Operation Winter SHIELD focuses on controls that repeatedly fail in real-world incidents. From an MSP and SMB perspective, the challenge is not whether these controls are theoretically sound, but how they are implemented, enforced, and sustained across many environments. Acronis supports Winter SHIELD by providing concrete operational coverage for these actions within the scope of endpoint protection, backup, recovery and security operations — while fitting into a broader security ecosystem where other platforms may also play a role.

Winter SHIELD calls for phishing-resistant authentication to reduce credential-based compromise. Within the Acronis ecosystem, this principle is applied to the Acronis management console itself. Acronis supports multifactor authentication for console access, helping protect the control plane where backups, recovery actions, security settings and tenant management are administered. For MSPs, this is especially important: the console represents concentrated authority across many customer environments, and hardening access to it reduces the risk of large-scale impact from a single compromised account.

One of the core Winter SHIELD actions is risk-based vulnerability management, with emphasis on patching known exploited vulnerabilities quickly. Acronis directly supports this through the combination of vulnerability assessment and automated patch management. Vulnerability assessment identifies missing patches and exposed software across managed endpoints, while patch management enables MSPs to deploy updates for operating systems and more than 300 third-party applications. Together, these capabilities help MSPs move from awareness to remediation without switching tools, making it easier to prioritize, schedule and verify patching across SMB environments.

This approach is further strengthened by Acronis Security Posture Management for Microsoft 365, which enables MSPs to assess and harden security configurations across multiple Microsoft 365 tenants from a single console. By automating complex security checks and user management tasks, it helps technicians of all experience levels identify and remediate risks more effectively than traditional audit‑based approaches, while significantly reducing operational effort and human error.

Winter SHIELD highlights the risk posed by unsupported software and hardware. Acronis supports this action by providing hardware and software inventory visibility within the management console. This enables MSPs to identify outdated operating systems, legacy applications, and devices that no longer receive security updates. By making end-of-life technology visible across tenants, MSPs can tie EOL findings to patching, upgrades, isolation or replacement decisions as part of a structured lifecycle approach.

Managing third-party risk is included in Winter SHIELD because vendors and suppliers are frequently involved in intrusion paths. Within its scope, Acronis contributes by enforcing baseline security hygiene on managed systems that third parties may access. Vulnerability assessment, patching, backup protection and recovery readiness help reduce the blast radius of third-party-related incidents. While third-party risk programs typically extend beyond endpoint protection, Acronis helps MSPs ensure that systems involved in vendor access remain protected, monitored and recoverable.

Winter SHIELD stresses the importance of protecting and retaining security logs so defenders can reconstruct events and support investigations. Acronis contributes to this requirement in several practical ways. The Acronis management console maintains audit logs that record administrative actions, providing traceability around configuration changes, backup operations, and recovery activity. In addition, Acronis can back up systems that generate or store logs, helping preserve log data as part of broader resilience planning. EDR events and forensic data can also be retained through protected backups, supporting investigation and post-incident analysis even if systems are disrupted.

In line with Winter SHIELD’s focus on early detection and effective investigation, Acronis Threat Hunting and Event Search extend log retention into active defensive use. These capabilities enable MSPs and defenders to quickly search, correlate and analyze security events across protected endpoints from a single console, supporting timely threat identification, incident scoping and evidence‑driven response — even when attackers attempt to disrupt or delete logs.

Backups are a central pillar of Winter SHIELD, particularly the requirement for offline or immutable backups and regular recovery testing. This aligns directly with Acronis’ core capabilities. Acronis supports image-level and file-level backups, immutable storage to protect backup data from tampering, and disaster recovery orchestration. MSPs can define recovery runbooks and AI technology developed in-house helps to validate successful recovery processes before an incident occurs. This turns backup from a passive safety net into an actively tested resilience control, which is exactly what Winter SHIELD promotes.

Winter SHIELD emphasizes identifying and protecting internet-facing assets, which are often targeted first by attackers. Within managed environments, Acronis supports this action by enabling vulnerability scanning and patch enforcement on endpoints that provide exposed services. Once a system is identified as internet facing, it can be brought under continuous assessment, prioritized patching and consistent protection policies. This helps MSPs reduce the attack surface of systems they manage and maintain a stronger baseline for exposed workloads.

Email remains one of the most common initial access vectors highlighted in Winter SHIELD. Acronis supports this area through Advanced Email Security, which focuses on blocking phishing, business email compromise, malicious attachments, and advanced threats using sandboxing and behavioural analysis. By stopping these attacks before they reach users, MSPs can significantly reduce credential theft, malware delivery and fraud incidents in SMB environments. This aligns well with Winter SHIELD’s emphasis on reducing preventable entry points that attackers repeatedly exploit.

Winter SHIELD encourages organizations to exercise incident response plans and ensure they can execute under pressure. Acronis supports the execution side of incident response by combining EDR investigation capabilities with backup and recovery. During an incident, Acronis can be used to collect forensic-friendly backups of affected systems, preserve system state, and support containment and recovery workflows. This gives MSPs practical tools to support investigation and restoration while maintaining evidence integrity.

Least-privilege access is another foundational Winter SHIELD principle. Acronis supports this through role-based access control within the Acronis console, allowing MSPs to define who can manage tenants, modify protection plans, access backups or initiate recovery. Device control features further help enforce policy at the endpoint level. For MSPs, applying least privilege in the management platform itself is critical, as it reduces the risk that a single account compromise leads to widespread impact across customers.

Operation Winter SHIELD reflects what MSPs already see every day: attacks succeed when fundamentals are inconsistently applied. The initiative’s value lies in its focus on execution, not theory. For MSPs and SMBs, the challenge is making those ten actions repeatable, measurable and sustainable across many environments.

Acronis supports that goal by helping MSPs operationalize Winter SHIELD principles through a single, integrated cyber protection platform: identifying risk, remediating vulnerabilities, protecting and testing backups, reducing email-based threats, preserving evidence and enforcing controlled administration. The result is not simply a stronger security posture on paper, but demonstrably more resilient outcomes during real incidents and under real operational pressure.