Acronis Cyber Cloud 7.8 Enhances Cyber Protection with 80+ New Features and Improvements

When they first set out to build Acronis Cyber Cloud our engineers asked themselves: What if MSPs could work with a single data protection platform that’s easy to use, efficient and secure, which evolves with technological advances and threats to data safety alike?

While it was no small task, last year they answered that question by delivering Acronis Cyber Cloud, the first single, turnkey SaaS solution that delivers multiple data protection solutions in one.

Having added more than 2,000 service providers to deliver in-demand data protection services to businesses worldwide in the last year, it’s clear their efforts were welcome and needed. In fact, 79 of the World's 100 Most Valuable Brands have chosen Acronis solutions.

The challenge now is to continue evolving the Acronis Cyber Cloud platform to meet end-user customer demands. Today we are excited to announce that version 7.8 is live with more than 80 new features and improvements.

Few of us can imagine working before there was Microsoft 365 apps (maybe the days using WordPerfect come to mind?). With such dependency and widespread use, few users stop to think about whether Microsoft protects the data in those apps. The truth is, while Microsoft has a great reputation for high availability of infrastructure and applications, the onus is on customers to protect their O365 data.

This gap is where the increasingly high-demand for third-party backup comes into play: Businesses need to be sure their data is secure and readily accessible no matter what. Otherwise, their business continuity and regulatory compliance are on the line.

With the release of Acronis Cyber Cloud 7.8, end-users can benefit from the peace of mind and efficiency Acronis Backup Cloud delivers by protecting data in the most popular O365 apps – Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.

For the uninitiated, it’s important to know that backup is the starting point and a steady approach for total recovery. Disaster recovery (DR) is a specialized solution that focuses on the recovery speed of critical data, which is absolutely essential to maintain business continuity. (Pro Tip: The uses-cases extend beyond natural disaster-related outages to anytime a business is without access to data locally or on-premises, e.g. fire or flood.)

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the way in which service providers enable DR for customers, or by leveraging cloud computing on their behalf. This means Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud significantly reduces recovery times so essential business systems can function remotely in the cloud until traditional systems can be restored.

Certainly, disaster recovery was an important solution released early on in Acronis Cyber Cloud. Now with version 7.8, end-user customers can expect even faster recovery times due to a new runbooks feature. This new technology simplifies and automates complex recovery plans for even simpler disaster recovery orchestration. Plus, the new RunVM engine significantly improves production and test failover speed, so partners can meet tighter RTO requirements and improve SLAs.

Since initial seeding is often painful for providers, Acronis Cyber Cloud 7.8 introduces a new physical data shipping service that ensures faster – secure – initial seeding, enabling cloud backup for slow networks.

Because the initial backup is transferred physically, only incremental backups must be performed thereafter. Providers can simply save the initial full backup to a hard drive on customer premises and ship it to an Acronis data center. It's easy to create a shipping order and track order statuses. And, with backup encryption in place, you can rest assured data is safe during shipping and once stored in the cloud.

Data authenticity is certainly a pressing concern for many companies – one that MSPs must be prepared to address. Now fully available for partners in Acronis Cyber Cloud 7.8, end-users can benefit from Acronis Notary Cloud, a blockchain-based service for file notarization, e-signing and data verification.

Thanks to the notarization service, users can guarantee the authenticity of a file as well as its existence at a specific point in time. Specifically, Acronis Notary Cloud creates a unique digital fingerprint for files and stores it in a public blockchain ledger (Ethereum), generating publicly verifiable proof of its timestamp and integrity. Acronis Notary Cloud reduces the risks to data security, ensures the integrity of business-critical data, and helps users achieve greater regulatory transparency.

There’s a reason walls were built in ancient times: to keep the unknown out and ensure the gatekeeper’s advantage. In times of cyberwarfare, robust walls need to be constructed around IT infrastructure.

Indeed, Acronis was the first data protection company to deliver built-in, artificial-intelligence-based anti-ransomware protection (i.e. Acronis Active Protection). Designed to thwart zero-day attacks and proven in labs to prevent 99.99 percent of ransomware strains, this defense stopped more than 400,000 attacks 2018. Of course as threats continue to evolve, so has Acronis’ technology.

With that in mind, the latest release now protects against encryption and automatically recovers files in network shares, just like on network drives – because what happens to one piece of hardware can create a domino effect across the entire organization. Acronis Active Protection scans removable devices to prevent ransomware infection of the protected device it is added to, as well as the corporate network. This means end-users have hardened defenses – inside and out – with advanced active protection enabled at each opportunity.

With the initial release of Acronis Cyber Cloud, MSPs could stop cobbling together solutions – and hoping for the best – to meet the evolving data protection needs of customers.

Today Acronis Cyber Cloud 7.8 takes that promise to another level: With a single turnkey cloud solution that bundles multiple, reliable modern data protection services in one, MSPs can even more easily deliver more efficient, secure cyber protection.