Acronis Reiterates Commitment To The Middle East
New Data Centre In Dubai Drives Home The Fact
Acronis provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management for managed service providers (MSPs), small and medium businesses, and enterprise IT departments. Headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, the company commemorates its 20th anniversary in 2024 and recently unveiled its Cyber Cloud data centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
At the Acronis Partner Day Dubai 2024 event, Gaidar Magdanurov, President of Acronis, shared insights on the company’s focus on Extended Detection and Response (XDR), remote management, and partner education. These initiatives, unique to Acronis, integrate cybersecurity and data protection solutions.
Excerpts from an interview with Magdanurov:
Why have an Acronis Cyber Cloud data centre in Dubai, considering that 52 similar facilities already operate worldwide?
Acronis’s decision to establish a local data centre in the UAE is a testament to our customer-centric approach and commitment to local regulations. This strategic move empowers Acronis’s partners to offer a unique value proposition, including the increasingly popular option of local data storage.
The local connection ensures faster backup and recovery, while local laws and regulations governing the data centre and data storage provide a sense of security and compliance. This unique offering of local data storage sets our partners apart from their competition, providing a clear competitive advantage.
Therefore, a local data centre allows Acronis’s partners to market their services to local customers, offering them local data storage as a competitive advantage against their competition.
What is Acronis’s 2024-2030 growth strategy for the Middle East region?
Acronis’s growth strategy for the Middle East is not just a plan. It is a comprehensive and long-term commitment. From 2024 to 2030, we are dedicated to executing a strategy built on three significant regional opportunities. This long-term commitment ensures our partners and the region that we are here to stay and support their growth.
These opportunities involve expanding our business and investing in our partners’ success and the region’s growth. We aim to provide our partners the tools and support they need to thrive and succeed, demonstrating our unwavering commitment to their success and the region’s development. Our partners are not just a part of our strategy; they are the key to our success in the Middle East.
First, offering Extended Detection and Response (XDR) as a complete security solution will allow Acronis’s partners to provide highly efficient and reliable cybersecurity to customers of any size.
One key element of our growth strategy is to leverage our AI-driven solutions to train existing IT professionals quickly and effectively. This will enable our partners to offer additional services and provide a platform for personal and professional growth for cybersecurity teams. By making cybersecurity more accessible, we aim to empower our partners and help them stay ahead of the competition.
Second, deploying remote monitoring and management will allow partners to scale their business and serve more customers with the same amount of human resources they have now.
Historically, the Middle East has not adopted many remote management tools, and Acronis fills the gap with an integrated solution. Management tools are combined with data protection and cybersecurity in a single console and single agent, simplifying the adoption of remote management.
Third, partners should be educated in sales and marketing to help them grow their business and provide cyber protection to more customers in the Middle East. Most managed service providers do not pay enough attention to sales and marketing. I see how much interest partners have in being trained in marketing their services.
Therefore, Acronis is investing significant resources to provide education via the MSP Academy and tools via the Acronis Partner Portal to enable our partners’ successful sales and marketing activities.
What differentiates Acronis in the global cyberprotection arena?
Unlike other vendors, Acronis offers natively integrated cyber protection that combines cybersecurity, data protection, monitoring and management in a single solution. This means there is a single agent to install and manage, a single console with a single UI, and a standardised approach to configuration.
This allows technicians to be onboarded much faster, simplifies day-to-day operations, prevents human errors, and enables technicians to be more productive. Native integration between cybersecurity and backup allows Acronis to provide unique capabilities, like using backup data to detect cyber threats, remove the threats from backups, patch systems on recovery, use a secondary copy of data to train real-time detection, and more.
Thus, Acronis is different from other vendors by enabling managed service providers to deliver more reliable protection and significantly increase the productivity of their IT teams. This leads to fewer incidents, higher customer satisfaction, and the ability of Acronis partners to recruit and serve more customers with the same team – leading to higher profits.
What goals did Acronis aim to achieve at Partner Day Dubai 2024?
We had a few objectives for the Acronis Partner Day event in Dubai. First, we needed to update our partners on the most recent developments in our security portfolio, including our Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services.
Second, we needed to provide our partners with content and stories to help them recruit, onboard new customers, and sell cybersecurity services to their customers more effectively. Third, to reinforce our commitment to the business in the Middle East, announcing a new data centre in the UAE and bringing our key executives to meet partners on site.
As a result, together with our partners, we see enormous potential for expanding the cyber protection business in the region and expect exceptional growth in the market. Even though the end competition customers are growing, Acronis still has a massive opportunity for cybersecurity services in the Middle East that our partners can pursue.
How different or similar is the threat landscape in the Middle East region compared to other areas worldwide?
The threat landscape in the Middle East differs from other areas worldwide, depending on numerous factors such as geopolitics conditions, cultural dynamics, and historical contexts. Cyber threats are a global concern, and the Middle East is not immune to them.
At an elevated level, cyber threat actors are motivated by three main factors: financial gain, espionage, and hacktivism. Cybercriminal threats are rarely country-specific; however, wealthier countries are more frequently targeted, placing many Middle Eastern countries in the same risk category as the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany. Ransomware attacks in the Middle East are similar to those in other affluent nations and are often executed by the same threat actors.
Hacktivism is less prevalent in the Middle East than in the Global West. While some incidents have been recorded, many were state-sponsored operations masquerading as hacktivism.
Cyber espionage operations, on the other hand, have distinct local characteristics influenced by the geopolitical landscape, international relations, hostilities, and climate change-related threats.
How does Acronis offer precise solutions to MSPs’ evolving needs in the Middle East region?
Acronis offers a complete platform for managed service providers, enabling them to use any capabilities separately and providing them the flexibility to design their technology stack.
Some partners use Acronis only as a cybersecurity solution, which involves installing an agent and enabling EDR/XDR capabilities. Some partners use Acronis as a local and cloud backup and backup for Microsoft 356. More partners are transitioning to Acronis as a complete stack – using cybersecurity, backup, management, and automation from Acronis and using the Acronis platform to integrate other tools, including the tools they create into a single Acronis management console.
The platform and integration capabilities allow Acronis to serve the needs of any service provider, as they are not limited to the functionality offered by Acronis and can integrate any other tools they would like to use.
The https://solutions.acronis.com/ Application Catalog offers multiple integrations with the popular products used by service providers, SDKs, and APIs for extensibility for any MSP or software vendor to integrate with the Acronis platform. Thus, partners in the Middle East can customise their offerings to customers’ needs in a specific country, industry, or even business.
Featured image: Gaidar Magdanurov, President of Acronis. Credit: Acronis
