Acronis, a Swiss-Singaporean cyber protection company, develops on-premises and cloud software for backup, disaster recovery solutions for enterprises. The Integrator met Candid Wüest, VP of Cyber Protection Research, Acronis, at CyberFit Summit to discuss new threat trends and comprehensive protection methods.

Speak about the nature of cloud protection Acronis offers to its enterprise customers

Acronis has a global team looking at all the threats which are out there. Whenever there is a new big vulnerability or some outbreak, we verify that we do protect enterprises against it also attempt to block it earlier in the attack chain.

We have a multi-layered approach from patch management to patch hotfix abilities. Besides analyzing vulnerabilities and carrying out behavior-based detection on applications, installed on your system, we are providing backup and disaster recovery services to enterprises so that they can restore all the data without any loss.

What sorts of vulnerabilities are to be identified and fixed?

Software vulnerabilities are the normal mistakes that programmers make. Some of them just reveal information, which is bad for privacy but not really bad from a security standpoint. However, the fact is you are compromised and vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

How do you help enterprises align the security standards, secure work environments, and remove vulnerabilities?

The key aspect is the visibility of your infrastructure. During the pandemic, lots of companies have shifted their employees to work from home or from anywhere, and of course, moved into the cloud for data services. More private/non-office networks are involved at this stage and vulnerabilities can be hosted by smart devices that are connected to these networks.

Most companies are forced to use multiple solutions to keep their data protected. We surveyed at the beginning of this year found out that 21 percent of the enterprises are using more than 10 solutions in parallel. That creates huge complexity and chances for some mistakes to be made. Acronis offers one agent that handles the job of all these solutions and keeps the work environment seamless.

What is your take on cloud services that enterprises are subscribed to and what are your recommendations?

We are agnostic about data centers, we can work with local storage, classical services, i.e., Azure and Amazon, or your private cloud if companies run themselves but we also have a strong focus on our own data centers. Acronis has about 40 different data centers around the globe because we want to have this local approach – an inside data center in your own country or region. E.g., GCC region.

When we operate through our own data centers, we can get the data encrypted and backed up. So even if someone could access those clouds, which they cannot, they would still not be able to get the data of anyone. We also offer hybrid models – some companies do have local backups still can have one backup into our cloud.

Tell us a bit about your regional goals and the amount of competition you face in the region

The Middle East is a very important strategic region for us. Our regional interest is to have strong partners in the region; be it in the UAE or the countries around it.

We don’t see any big competition that can cover all of those aspects of our service. With classical security, antivirus, anti-ransomware together with patch management and remote access in one solution is still an unexplored area even by major solutions providers.

Candid Wüest is the VP of Cyber Protection Research at Acronis, where he researches on new threat trends and comprehensive protection methods.