Acronis in Partnership With Microsoft

Acronis International GmbH announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. for deeper integration of its data protection products with Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.

Acronis provides complete data protection for all Microsoft workloads (including workstations, servers, applications and mobile devices), helping customers, resellers and service providers leverage the power of Microsoft’s technology stack. Acronis also can backup Azure workloads, with Acronis Backup and Acronis Backup Cloud.

The partnership will allow customers and service providers to store their data or clients’ data in the Azure cloud. Azure will be available as a storage destination option alongside Acronis Cloud and other public cloud vendors in future versions of Acronis products.

Acronis partners and customers use Azure’s capacity for storing data, but it requires manual installation and configuration of the Acronis Backup Gateway. Acting on customer and partner requests, Acronis and Microsoft are working together on providing native integration of Acronis solutions with Azure services.

Service providers can choose to buy their Azure storage directly from Microsoft, or Acronis can include the Azure storage costs as part of a single invoice.

Native integration of Acronis’ data protection solutions with Azure will make Azure-based service more attractive and will help Microsoft partners drive more revenue. Service providers will be able to complement their Azure-based product offerings with Acronis’ data protection solutions augmented by Acronis Active Protection, an AI-based defense against ransomware attacks. Together with Acronis, they will be able to drive more Azure usage and generate additional revenue by upselling data protection services to existing clients and using Acronis’ complete data protection as a differentiator in the crowded market space.

The partnership with Microsoft is part of Acronis’ overall strategy to support all workloads, delivering safety, security, accessibility, privacy and authenticity for data stored in local, cloud and hybrid environments.

By delivering full support of more than 20 platforms, native integration with PSA and RMM tools, and growing support of public cloud vendors, Acronis enables service providers to make the most out of their existing cloud arrangements.

“A lot of products that we build deliver value to clients using Microsoft technology,” said Acronis president John Zanni. “With easy, reliable and efficient backup and built-in security in the form of active protection against ransomware, our clients enjoy complete protection of their data. Adding Azure as a native storage destination increases their options, making Acronis solutions even more attractive to use. For any organization that has built their strategy on Microsoft, this is great news.“

Judy Meyer, GM, ISV partners at Microsoft, agrees: “It’s great to see how Acronis is transforming the services it offers to its customers, innovating in anti-ransomware and data protection. Microsoft and Acronis have worked closely together over several years in planning the adoption of public cloud services as part of Acronis’ portfolio, and we’re delighted to see the progress that’s been made in using Azure and the Microsoft AI platform.“

Acronis’ partnership with Microsoft will extend beyond Azure integration. The two companies will join forces extending the AI functionality of Acronis Active Protection – a technology that has already prevented over 200,000 ransomware attacks across 180,000 consumer devices in the past 12 months.

The partnership has already inspired joint research, for example, discussing applications of Hierarchical Attention Neural Network for sequence classification to detect malware without executing the malware code, as published in the Microsoft Developer Blog.

“Microsoft has invested decades of research into artificial intelligence including; cognitive services, conversational AI, Machine Learning tools and more … and has built the global cloud platform to help our customers make use of these powerful AI technologies. By using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and AI Tools/Services with the Acronis Backup service, Acronis will be able to work on bringing valuable analytics services to market, so their customers can understand and manage their data much more effectively,” commented Steve Guggenheimer, VP of business AI, Microsoft.