Acronis Files Cloud — the File Sync & Share You've Been Waiting For

If you are a Service Provider and have customers who use public cloud file sync & share services for business purposes, you need to read this. Acronis Files Cloud provides you with an opportunity to meet your customers’ needs and help them protect important business data.

Don’t get me wrong. Public file hosting is probably one of the most useful Internet commodity inventions of the last decade. Without public cloud, we wouldn’t know what to do with all that data we generate every day. However, while it’s useful for personal file storage and sharing photos with your overseas relatives, it presents several real challenges for business. First, you don’t know where the data is actually stored (what country, what datacentre), and second, it doesn’t have the necessary user account management capability. If the data gets deleted from your public cloud, you may never know who did it or where it’s gone. With Acronis Files Cloud, the story is different. It is specifically designed for business use, and Service Providers have full control.

Acronis Files Cloud is a business grade file sync & share service specifically designed for Service Providers. The core engine is hosted by Acronis but Service Providers have the opportunity to use their own storage capacity for storing the customers’ data. If you have some spare hardware and available storage capacity (why not use Acronis Storage!), you already have everything you need. There is no software outlay — just install and run. Service Providers can set their own margins and only pay for the actual use. If you have Odin Automation provisioning system, it’s even better. Acronis Files Cloud supports it straight out of the box. And if you don’t, it has a REST API, which you use for integration with other control panels. (Full integration with Acronis Cloud provisioning portal is expected in 2017).

In its core functionality, which includes file storage, synchronization across multiple devices, and sharing, Acronis Files Cloud performs equality well as the mainstream public share & sync providers. But when it comes to user security, control over the physical location of data, and the integration with provisioning systems, there is a vast difference.

Here is a short summary (inconclusive, can be used as a guide only).

Acronis Files Cloud technology has been in production for many years, powering Acronis Access Advanced. If you’ve never heard about Acronis Access Advanced it’s an award-winning on-premise enterprise solution trusted for security and performance by a number of Fortune 500 financial, insurance, pharmaceutical, and public sector firms, with hundreds of thousands users.

According to the IDC Worldwide SMB Business File Sync & Sharing Forecast published last year, revenue from SMB consumption of business file sync & share services is expected to reach $1.3 billion in 2019, growing at an average annual rate of 18%. Such market growth potential presents a valuable opportunity for Service Providers.

Acronis Files Cloud allows Service Providers to generate incremental revenue (the more data your customers store on your servers, the more you earn), improve retention rates (customers who buy multiple services from the same provider are more likely to stay), and grow the bottom line (file sync & share is part of everyday life, astronomical amount of data is generated every day, and most of it is stored in file clouds like this).

Acronis Files Cloud enables Service Providers to utilize their own data storage infrastructure, rebrand the service, and bundle it with existing services and data protection products.

Bundled services increase customer retention rates or, to say it in a different way, reduce customer churn. With Acronis Files Cloud, customers not only have complete control over their data, but also the knowledge where the data is physically stored. This is critical when complying with local or national data sovereignty regulations.

Acronis Files Cloud also has a simple licensing model, which is similar to other Acronis cloud products. It lets Service Providers to set their own margins and start providing services without any upfront investment in software. You can start offering the most services at the best possible prices straight away and focus on building your customer base.

Still not convinced? Next time you speak to your business customers, mention potential risks associated with trusting business data to a public cloud. Then ask them how much data they already have there. Then translate it into dollars and multiply by the number of customers you already have. This is what you could earn every month providing the service. Install today and start earning tomorrow!

To learn more about Acronis Files Cloud, go to http://www.acronis.com/en-us/provider/files-cloud/