Dan's Take

Acronis Launches Backup Products Targeting The Mid-Market

Cloud backup is expanded.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 07/19/2016

Acronis's John Zanni, CMO and SVP Channel and Cloud Strategy, and Frank Jablonski, VP Product Marketing, came by to bring me up to date on what the company has been doing recently, and to fill me in on Acronis Backup 12. I've always enjoyed my conversations with representatives of Acronis. The conversations are always focused on pragmatic, real-world issues rather than hyperbole. It's refreshing.

Acronis is feeling enthusiastic about the capabilities of hybrid clouds, and wants to help enterprises make the best use of that approach to computing for business continuity and disaster avoidance. To that end, the company announced updates to its backup offering, a "backup cloud," an update to Acronis Storage and a monitoring service. Let's briefly examine each of these products and services:

• Acronis Backup 12. This product release offers image backup for a long list of computing platforms and applications, including: Microsoft's Azure, Windows Server, Windows PC, Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Active Directory and Hyper-V; Amazon's EC2; Linux Server; Apple Mac OS, iPhone and iPad; Android; and VMware vSphere. It supports both on-premises and cloud computing environments. It also makes it possible to perform any-to-any migrations and recover from one environment to another. It offers both an on-premises and cloud-based dashboard for monitoring and managing Backup 12 functions.
• Backup Cloud. This product targets the needs of service providers and their customers. Backup Cloud makes it possible for service providers to offer a cost-effective, hybrid backup and recovery service.
• Acronis Storage. This product is also aimed at the needs of service providers. It's a storage platform designed to provide high levels of integrity for customer data in regulated computing environments.
• Acronis Cloud. Acronis is offering its own cloud storage service, and now has 12 datacenters around the world, including the U.S., Europe, Russia, Singapore, Japan and Australia.

This announcement shows Acronis is focused on making backup, data recovery and data continuity powerful, comprehensive and easy to use for the mid-market. Since the company's founding, this has been its hallmark.

When asked how the company cuts through the noise to convince enterprises to select Acronis over the competition, Zanni said that once the company gets an enterprise to try out the product set, they usually have a new, loyal customer.  My conversations with Acronis customers at events prove out Zanni's comments. Administrators I've spoken with always offer positive comments on the products, and usually offer a story on how Acronis saved them when a storage device or network component failed.