businessinfomag.uk magazine 30 James Goulding (JG): Acronis has seen a few transformations in its 23-year history? What’s different about this one? Jan-Jaap Jager (JJ): The speed at which everything is going right now is something we’ve never seen before. I remember in 2003, when I was working at Microsoft, trying to convince people that things would soon come from a data centre and MSPs wouldn’t need their own software and hardware; they would just get what they needed from the wall, so to speak. Back then, I said it would take 10 years. Today, probably 90% of the industry has some kind of cloud service in their portfolio. It’s been a great transformation, but it took 20 years. With AI, if you’re not doing it today, you are going to have some challenges down the line. AI is coming with such velocity, how are you going to control it? Who’s going to keep you anchored to the ground when the AI tornado comes? Larger enterprises will have the capacity, the knowledge, the funding, the resources to take this on, but how are the small and medium-sized businesses and smaller enterprises served by our 20,000 partners going to cope? They won’t know how to do AI in the most effective way, because that’s not their core business. They will come to MSPs for AI. We see this as a huge opportunity. JG: SMEs are not the only ones challenged by AI. Many MSPs themselves don’t know how to maximise the opportunity. JJ: Today, everybody looks at AI and says how can I use it to optimise my operational efficiency? How can I reduce the number of engineers doing support from 10 to 7, or how can I get more from those 10 engineers and not hire another five? That’s very operationally focused. People are missing this key point – the opportunity doesn’t lie in what of the AI era, not as others have done by adding AI as a layer on top of a platform, but by natively integrating an AI development framework, Cyber Fabric, into Cyber Protect’s core system. This allows MSPs to accelerate the development of new AI services for their customers, while making sure that AI is protected and secured at every layer, without requiring them to master additional tools and dashboards. The first solutions to take advantage of this underlying framework are: Cyber Studio – a low code, no code platform for building any workflow or AI automation; and Cyber Intelligence – a native, AI-powered platform embedded into the Cyber Protect platform that connects all services and is thus effectively the first step towards autonomous cybersecurity. Another significant development announced by Acronis is the launch of Cyber Frame, a ‘protected by default’ hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform purpose-built for MSPs, cloud service providers, hosting providers and telcos. Combining virtual machines, networking and storage with natively integrated cyber protection, backup and disaster recovery, threat protection and remote monitoring and management, Cyber Frame gives services providers an opportunity to regain control of their infrastructure strategy at a time of disruption in legacy virtualisation, rising hyperscaler costs and growing demand for regional and sovereign cloud solutions. On May 21, James Goulding discussed these developments with Acronis CEO Jan-Jaap (JJ) Jager at the Acronis Cyber Day in London. In May, Swiss cyber security and cyber resilience company Acronis announced that its core platform was now AI-first, marking the latest in a series of stepchanges by the company since its foundation as a backup provider in Singapore in 2003. In 2014, it switched from being a provider of on-premises backup to cloud backup for managed service providers (MSPs) with the launch of a multi-tenant cloud platform built from scratch. Five years later, in 2019, it addressed the threat of ransomware by launching a new platform, Cyber Protect, that natively integrated security and back-up in one platform, with one agent. It later enhanced this platform with new security capabilities (EDR, MDR, XDR, email security) before, in 2024, adding new operational capabilities, notably remote monitoring and management (RMM) and professional services automation (PSA). Now, Acronis is responding to the challenges and opportunities With Jan-Jaap (JJ) Jager, CEO of Acronis Q&A Q&A Jan-Jaap (JJ) Jager
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