Acronis has officially pulled the wraps off a sprawling family of security products and integration technologies designed to propel an ambitious strategy to transform itself from BDR vendor to provider of end-to-end cyber protection solutions.
The new offerings include a multi-layered edge and endpoint security solution, a custom-built data protection infrastructure system, and a set of APIs and software development kits for connecting third-party solutions and services to those offerings.
All three products debuted on the first day of Acronis’s first ever Global Cyber Summit event, which is taking place in Miami this week. Their goal is to help Acronis and its partners conquer a market for cybersecurity, data protection, software-defined storage, privacy management, data authenticity management, and associated services worth a collective $250 billion annually and growing by double digits, according to Acronis CEO Serguei Beloussov.
“It’s a huge opportunity,” he said during a keynote presentation this morning.
Named Acronis Cyber Protect and previewed earlier in the year under the name Total Protect, the new edge and endpoint security system combines backup, disaster recovery, anti-malware, anti-ransomware, web filtering, and data authenticity validation functionality, among other features, in a single package with one agent and a unified license.
According to Beloussov, merging BDR and security functionality into one solution allows users to rebound faster from incidents that even the best software can’t prevent entirely. “If something did happen and it wasn’t stopped you can safely recover with minimal loss of money, data, or time,” he says.
Acronis Cyber Protect runs on Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, a hyperconverged infrastructure solution for storing backups and running recovery environments. Purpose-built by Acronis for use with its cyber protection portfolio, the system supports software-defined networking as well as software-defined block, file, and object storage.
According to Beloussov, infrastructure is an essential part of an effective cyber protection solution; requiring partners to purchase and integrate it separately would burden them with added complexity.
“Any protection solution without infrastructure is not complete,” he told ChannelPro today.
Customers can acquire Acronis Cyber Infrastructure either as software or pre-installed on a custom-designed appliance. They can then run it on-premises, in Acronis’s cloud, or in a third-party public cloud. “You can deploy it with us, you can deploy it with yourself, you can deploy it with your customer, you can deploy it with your partner,” Beloussov said in his keynote.
The system is engineered to be simpler and more affordable than hyperconverged solutions from vendors such as Nutanix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s SimpliVity unit. “We designed it to be extremely easy, because it’s only for secondary workloads,” Beloussov says.
Like all Acronis products, Cyber Protect and Cyber Infrastructure are available at per device and per-GB rates designed to align easily with recurring revenue business models.
Underlying both systems is a set of foundation technologies called Acronis Cyber Platform that includes multiple APIs backed by SDKs, documentation, sample code, a dedicated support team, and a developer portal. Over time, Acronis hopes to turn the system into the integration point for an ecosystem of supplementary data protection products from software makers and service providers.
“We cannot do it all ourselves,” says Beloussov of tackling the security challenge.
Developers can utilize Cyber Platform, he continues, to convert a standalone solution into a seamlessly linked component of Acronis’s security architecture. “You can build a completely separate product,” he said this morning, “but when you integrate it with Acronis Cyber Platform it’s one solution. It doesn’t make anything any more complicated, hopefully not any more expensive, and also it keeps the security in place.”
All three new offerings integrate with Acronis Cyber Cloud, the company’s multi-tenant, cross-product SaaS platform for service providers. Formerly named Acronis Data Cloud, that system included backup, disaster recovery, file sync and share, and notarization solutions already.
Acronis is far from the only company to see potential in the synergies between backup and security. Backup vendor Carbonite, for instance, purchased security vendor Webroot earlier this year for $618.5 million in pursuit of the same vision.
The introduction of Acronis’s cyber protection product family also comes on the same day private equity investor Thoma Bravo announced its intention to acquire security vendor Sophos for an estimated $3.9 billion.
The market for security hardware, software, and services will expand at a 9.2% CAGR through 2022 to $133.8 billion, according to IDC. Acronis is growing rapidly even before its play for a share of that spending gets started in earnest. The vendor expects revenue for all of its products to climb 30% this year and cloud revenue specifically to jump 200%. It’s company-wide target for 2020 is to increase the top line at least another 40%. Speaking only partially in jest during his keynote this morning, Beloussov characterized that goal as a modest one given the scale of the security opportunity.
“In my opinion, we should grow 100%,” he said.
