Acronis has a security services automation solution and updated edition of its RMM platform headed to its Cyber Protect Cloud platform soon.
The new and enhanced tools, both of which are unusual offerings from security vendors, are designed to help MSPs build and operate scalable, efficient, and profitable security service practices.
Acronis shared details about both systems during its #CyberFit Summit event in Miami today and yesterday.
The PSA solution, called Acronis Advanced Automation, supports customer billing, including for consumption-based and as-a-service offerings, as well as ticketing, SLA tracking, and technician performance measurement.
“At any point of time, you will be able to see what is the workload of a specific technician, what is the utilization of a specific technician, what is the utilization of your whole team so you can make an educated decision when to hire employees,” says Acronis CTO Oleg Melnikov. A net promoter score tool in the solution will help users determine how satisfied customers are with specific technicians as well, he adds.
The new system also collects detailed per-tenant data on billable and non-billable time and then factors it into operational and profitability reports and dashboards.
“You will be able to see directly in Acronis Cyber Protect how profitable this customer is, how profitable the service class is, and how profitable the service you’re selling is so you can focus on the customers and the services that make sense for you as a business,” Melnikov says.
Updates to Acronis Advanced Management, the vendor’s RMM solution, include new automated machine learning-based monitoring functionality designed to call attention to anomalously behaving hardware, software, and processes without generating unnecessary alerts.
“It’ll help us to fine tune values specifically for you and your customer to make sure that we’re not generating too much noise,” Melnikov says.
A revised patch management feature will let administrators rollback updates based on automated backups when patches fail. Users will have the ability to schedule patch rollouts for the first time as well.
“You will be able to specify at what time of the day and during which maintenance windows specific updates can be installed,” Melnikov says.
Granular patch customization functionality will let MSPs selectively deploy minor updates ahead of major ones and temporarily exclude specific endpoints needed for high-priority tasks.
Remote desktop enhancements will add support for both MacOS and Linux devices and allow either technicians or users to initiate support sessions. Users will see better performance over slow networks as well, according to Acronis, and have new tools for communicating and collaborating with end users.
“We built in session chat and we built in session file transfer, which will bring performance and efficiency of technicians to the next level,” Melnikov says.
Two-factor authentication functionality and a new protocol with two-way AES encryption aim to secure both the remote desktop tool and the Cyber Scripting feature Acronis added to Advanced Management in July from unauthorized access.
The new remote desktop features are set to ship in December, followed by the other Advanced Management updates in the first three months of next year. Advanced Automation will ship that quarter too.
Coming in the second half of 2023 is a new feature in Acronis’s BDR solutions that will allow users to geo-replicate storage in multiple data centers and failover from one to the other should the primary location go down. The initial version of the service will copy data across Acronis facilities in Phoenix and Washington D.C.
The addition of managed services tools to Acronis’s security platform comes as managed service toolmakers are steadily growing security portfolios. In September, for example, Datto announced plans to introduce managed SOC and SASE services, as well as an EDR solution. ConnectWise, for its part, introduced new tools for procuring cyber insurance and an updated risk assessment solution in June.
Acronis, meanwhile, joins GoTo among the ranks of vendors not normally associated with PSA and RMM software introducing such tools in a bid to help project- and product-oriented channel pros launch recurring revenue service practices.
Developing and enhancing solutions like Advanced Automation and Advanced Management is the primary way Acronis plans to invest the $250 million funding round it completed in July.
