With the world changing drastically in the past couple of months, things like cybersecurity and data backup have become more important than ever. And both these areas are so vast that it’s not easy to find the best solution for you or your company’s needs. However, the Switzerland-based Acronis has been a leading player in the segment since its inception in 2003. Unlike companies that are either focused on the data backup or cybersecurity or only a few aspects of them, Acronis aims to be a one-stop shop to help companies secure their data. To understand Acronis’ proposition better, how it stands out from the competition, and more, we recently had a Zoom call with Mr Rajesh Chhabra, Sales Director – South Asia at Acronis.
PS: the interview has been edited for the sake of brevity.
Table of Contents
1) Before we begin talking about Acronis, can you share your journey into the world of SaaS?
Sharing his extensive experience of over two decades, he mentioned “I am an electronics engineer, and then I completed my master’s degree in customer operations. I started working with Convergys, and at that time I used to be a part of internet service provider from the US called as WorldNet. We used to handle the global tech support for our customers, including connectivity issues. After working there for about four years, I grabbed an opportunity to move to Dell. I was heading consumer tech service delivery for both the laptops and desktop division. I worked with them for about three years, and then I moved on to Bertelsmann, a global media publishing house. So there I was the IT service delivery head for high-tech industries. I had multiple clients, including Microsoft, Google, and I used to take care of service delivery for them, as well as product development for many of their CRM applications. It was with Bertelsmann that we also onboarded Acronis global service delivery. I was chosen to head that project, and worked on the same for about 10 years. We did a lot of exciting things, and launched Acronis global service delivery in the English-speaking continents. Afterwards, I moved to Salesforce. I was the senior service delivery leader for India for Salesforce and I handled vendor operations for companies like HCL and Cognizant. Finally, I got an opportunity to come back to Acronis, and I am now heading their sales for South Asia. I joined in the beginning of this year.“
2) Can you tell us about the various offerings in the Acronis portfolio, and what ties them all together?
He started with a brief introduction to the company by stating “Acronis is truly a global company. We have a base of about 500,000 customers, and 50,000 partners associated with us. Our products are available in 150 countries across the world, and we’ve five million consumer or prosumer users. Our offices are located across 33 locations. In terms of our product portfolio, I would say that Acronis sets the standard in hybrid cloud data protection strategy, i.e. we combine the best of data protection with a modern cybersecurity approach, and hence, we introduced cyber protection, which is a term coined by Acronis. Elaborating further on the cyber protection approach, we have individual products and all of them are catering to the philosophy of providing you complete cyber protection: backup and disaster recovery, secure file access, sync and share, storage, and monitoring solution among others. All our solutions are available on-premises as well as a SaaS offering. We also have another SaaS offering which is the Acronis Cloud, which is a hybrid cloud that has been built from the ground up for cloud service solution providers. It is a multi-tenant and multi-tier architecture, which offers flexibility to service providers to tailor the solution and offer a custom cloud offering with custom pricing and with individual monitoring and reporting for all of their end-users.“
Adding further, he said “what ties them all together is our commitment about cyber protection, which is based on five vectors called by the acronym SAPAS. It stands for safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security. All our products conform to these five vectors, which means:
i. Safety: your data should be safe, and you should have a reliable copy of your data always available to you. So at Acronis, we follow a 3-2-1 strategy, wherein we say that there should be three copies of your data, one on-premises, one off-site, and one on the cloud.
ii. Accessibility: with Acronis, your data is accessible across any environment, be it virtual, or physical cloud or mobile.
iii. Privacy: a user will have full control over who has visibility and access to their data with Acronis.
iv. Authenticity: with the Acronis blockchain notarization technology, you are always sure that your backup copy is an exact replica of the original. So unauthorized edits which can threaten your filing system are taken care of by our blockchain technology as we will provide you an undeniable proof and a guarantee that your data is unaltered.
v. Security: Acronis will protect your applications and systems. We’ll protect your workload from the latest cyber threats and zero-day attacks.
In sum, this is the commitment that binds all the Acronis products across its portfolio together,” he concluded.
3) Can you tell us more about the blockchain notarization technology?
To this, Mr Rajesh Chhabra replied “the credit for the same goes to our R&D team. We are the pioneers in this unique implementation of blockchain technology We use the blockchain technology for ensuring that you have undeniable proof that your data is unaltered and you can generate a certificate for that. Similarly, we have one more implementation of the blockchain technology in our Acronis Files product where, when you share files across platforms, then it’s used to ensure that the recipient of the file received the file in the same condition that it was sent, because we use a hash algorithm to track whether the file is unedited. So, to the recipient can always go ahead and download a certificate to see if the hash algorithm has changed or not. Thus, the businesses can rest assured that their data in files and folders is being transmitted in secure and military-grade encryption.“
4) What kind of industries are using Acronis the most?
He shared that “our customers are across all verticals, including business, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure. Data today is one of the basic needs for every organization – right from running a business to even make strategic decisions – securing it is also a challenge for every industry. And with the Acronis Cyber Protect, we offer unparalleled security for this data.”
5) What’s the userbase of Acronis in India? Where does the Indian market stack up for Acronis?
He told us that “APAC, of which India is a part, is the third-biggest market for Acronis and one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. Since we launched in India in early 2009, we have seen a huge increase in our customer base across all verticals. We have also seen our partner base growing exponentially and, and because of this growth, we are targeting to double our partner base by the end of 2020. That’s a 100 percent growth that we’re targeting for the Indian market.“
6) While you mentioned that Acronis takes care of cyber protection and data backup in a seamless manner, it’s competing against a lot of companies, who are offering similar features or specifically focus on one or two attributes such as security against viruses and malware. So how does Acronis stand out from its rivals?
“We have now established the fact that your data protection strategy should satisfy the five vectors of SAPAS. They’re all critical, but we have seen that in many traditional approaches, they work against each other. For example, if you lock your server in a vault inside a company, you are making the data safe from accidental deletion, but you are compromising the accessibility of your data. Similarly, if you need to secure your data from threats and you have a traditional antivirus, another software for data protection, one vendor for ensuring privacy and another for giving you a firewall, it means you need multiple solutions to satisfy these five pillars. But then that brings with it a unique set of challenges of data protection, for multiple applications tend to conflict with each other and integration also becomes an issue,” he explained.
Talking about the competition, he stated that “there are many companies in the market, and we’ve also seen some data protection companies who are now buying security companies or vice versa to offer a bundled solution. But keep in mind, the key difference between such solutions, and our product is the integration at all these five levels of SAPAS. Acronis Cyber Protect is a product that has been built from the ground up to satisfy all these five aspects, which is why we’ve a single package, a single user interface for cyber protection, a single management policy. With one single UI, you can keep your data secure, accessible, ensure privacy, and ensure that it’s authentic and reliable. And it’s safe from external and internal threats.“
Providing examples, he added “of late, there has been an exponential increase in cyber-attacks, and many companies have also fallen prey to them. I can tell you with confidence today that if they were using Acronis products, none of these cyber-attacks would have been successful. Our ransomware protection would have been able to stop all these attacks. I will go a step further and quantify it for you. We recently commissioned antivirus scanning to perform a prevalence detection test on our Cyber Protect solution for detecting ransomware attacks. And in that in that test, a set of 6,932 malicious files were used. Cyber Protect scored a perfect hundred percent in detecting these attacks. So we can say that we are in a league of our own with Cyber Protect and our other solutions, and we do not have any competition.“
6) Can you shed some light on your marketing strategy and how are you reaching out to potential customers?
Mr Chhabra responded “our business success is based on our extensive partner network. As I mentioned earlier, we have a network of 50,000 partners across the globe. And the demand for cybersecurity and cyber protection has been exploding in the past few months. As we’re seeing people working remotely, we’re seeing more workloads being conducted over unsecured networks, and people trying to remotely get into their company’s network. Hence the demand for cybersecurity has increased. Additionally, we’re seeing an exponential increase in the number of partner requests. So currently, we are fully invested in increasing our partner network. For reaching out to potential users, we conduct a lot of webinars, wherein we invite industry experts for discussions on cyber protection. While in the pre-COVID era, we used to do a lot of industry events, we’re now focusing on educating the users online.“
7) We’re living in challenging times. So what’s Acronis doing during this time?
“Acronis team has been tracking attacks globally through our Cyber Protection Operation Centers (CPOC) and these are located across the world, and we are blocking close to 1,500 attacks per day, which is already a 50 percent growth over the past two months. In India alone, we are seeing several thousands of attacks happening. If you ask me about the trend, we have recently seen that the growth of crypto mining attacks has increased by about 30 percent. It could be because of corporate computers being left unattended in offices; they’re becoming a breeding ground for cryptojacking. The sad part is that the success rate for these attacks is also increasing. People are falling for COVID-19-themed phishing emails, and there are malicious portals as well. There are also Coronavirus maps that are fraudulent websites that infect the user’s network with malware. So our CPOC has been at the forefront of blocking these attacks daily,” he commented.
“With that said, Acronis solutions have never been more relevant. We’ve features like remote installation, so that remote employees can install Cyber Protect on their endpoints and remotely backup to the cloud, and in the case these systems crash, they can do a remote recovery. So the IT department can perform a remote recovery of these systems and which is why we have seen such and such a huge increase in interest for cyber protection solutions from Acronis. We also recognize that these are challenging times for our customers, both financially as well as the need to secure themselves against cyber-attacks. We’ve been one of the early movers in trying to solve these problems for our customers, and we ran a lot of promotions. For example, for the Acronis cyber backup cloud users, we initiated a promo that we made Cyber Protect completely free for our Cloud users. Similarly, we made the secure files and secure file sync free for our customers and self-service providers till July 31st. Overall, it has been a multi-pronged approach, right from blocking attacks to helping service providers, and educating the end-users on how to remotely work safely,” he finished.
8) What does the future look like for Acronis?
Mr Chhabra emphasized that “our future is all about Acronis Cyber Protect. We have already launched the Cyber Protect on the cloud, while the on-prem version will be available by early July 2020. And that’s because we now understand that the modern-age criminals aren’t coming through doors or windows, they are coming through your devices. And that’s why you’ve seen frauds related to Paytm payment gateway, and frauds related to credit card information stored on your devices. We aim to enable our service providers to offer cyber protection solutions to their existing customers. Our next few months are completely going to be dedicated to empowering our existing customers with the cyber protect feature on their workloads. With this being a game-changing product, Acronis is projected to grow by almost 100 percent year on year.”
He also mentioned that “on the prosumer side, Acronis True Image was the first product, and we have launched our artificial intelligence and machine language-based ransomware protection, about two years back. So the consumer and prosumer solutions are also a part of our growth strategy.”
9) What are your favorite SaaS products out there?
He shared that “I am fond of Acronis Cyber Protect. I’ve installed it on not just my official laptop, but my personal one as well. In fact, I’ve it installed on the laptops of friends and families as well because I believe in the power of Cyber Protect and keeping all data protected. Moreover, it eliminates the need to have multiple products. This one solution does everything for me, as it gives me an antivirus, it backs up my data on the cloud, I can recover the data wherever I require, and it does vulnerability assessment of my PC and installs patches. Additionally, it also lets me turn on continuous data protection for some of the most critical files I have which I require daily.”
“Apart from that, I use usual SaaS applications such as an email suite and a CRM,” he added.
