Data Center POST recently had the opportunity to speak with Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Channel and Cloud Strategy of Acronis, John Zanni, while at HostingCon, which took place between July 24-27 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The conference is the largest gathering of the hosting and cloud services community in the world. In our Q&A with Mr. Zanni, we discussed data, the cloud software industry, the company’s latest product, Acronis Notary and what Acronis achieved at HostingCon.
Q and A with Data Center Post’s Contributing Editor, Kathy Xu
Data Center POST, Kathy Xu (DCP-KX) Question: Tell our readers about Acronis: What do you do and what problems are you attempting to solve?
Acronis, John Zanni’s (ACRONIS-JZ) Answer: Acronis provides a full set of hybrid cloud data protection solutions that enable businesses and IT Managers to control company data no matter where it is located.
The world around us is changing faster than ever. Data is everywhere — not just on a single device or locked up behind secure datacenter walls — it’s in our phones, our watches, airplanes, computers, schools and hospitals. So the problem we are solving today is enabling individuals and businesses to protect their full digital image — all the data that is part of their lives.
Data is the lifeline of every business. Without it, businesses cannot survive in today’s digital world. Data must be protected. Acronis is moving from an isolated device protection approach to a complete digital business protection strategy. By combining the world’s fastest backup solution with the industry’s most flexible storage options and non-stop monitoring, Acronis is able to meet the data protection requirements of a modern business.
DCP-KX Q: How does Acronis keep up with the cloud software industry?
ACRONIS-JZ A: Acronis is an established company with a clear product development roadmap, hundreds of registered patents, and capable people with proven success in the industry in key management roles. The company was founded in 2003 and has over 350 engineers focusing on developing the best data protection technology in the world.
Acronis has 20 R&D specialists working at Acronis Labs on technologies that will come into our product line over the next three to five years. The latest product from our R&D team is Acronis Notary, which is based on Blockchain technology, and scheduled to be released in October.
Acronis Notary is a tamper-proof data storage technology that leverages Blockchain to ensure data authenticity, privacy and control. Acronis will apply Blockchain algorithms to its solutions, which provide a record of digital events distributed across different participants or entities, and opens up a broad range of new data protection use cases for businesses worldwide. With Blockchain, data and transactions can only be updated by rules of consensus between participants in the system, and when new data is entered, it can never be erased.
DCP-KX Q: What upcoming new developments are in store for Acronis?
ACRONIS-JZ A: As mentioned above, the new developments are focused on extending data protection beyond individual devices. This includes the new features of Acronis Backup 12, which enable users to backup and protect company data in virtually any environment; Acronis Notary for authenticating data; Acronis Storage for secure software-defined storage with data resilience and self-healing features; Acronis Monitoring Service for performance, device, and network monitoring; and Acronis Files Cloud for locally-stored secure file sharing.
These feature-rich products are designed to empower customers to control and manage their digital persona and all digital components of their business. Acronis is committed to move in this direction in the years to come.
DCP-KX Q: What do you hope you accomplished at HostingCon?
ACRONIS-JZ A: What we planned for HostingCon, we have achieved. The conference provided us with an opportunity to reconnect with existing partners and showcase our newest product innovations to a wider community of service providers and cloud resellers. We also made sure they got to have a hands-on experience of our products right at our booth.
In addition to the products mentioned above, Acronis announced an update to Acronis Backup Cloud, a multi-tenant, multi-tiered Backup-as-a-Service solution. Now it offers protection for Microsoft Azure and Office 365 accounts, in addition to the most common platforms and workloads in use by service providers and hosters today, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Azure, Amazon EC2, Linux, Mac, VMware, SQL Server, iOS, Android, and much more
DCP-KX: Thank you for your time. If you are interested in learning more about Acronis, please visit http://www.acronis.com/.
