In May, cybersecurity company Acronis announced the latest stage in its development with the launch of ‘one platform built and powered by the breakthrough of the century’ i.e. AI.
This is the latest in a series of transformations undertaken by the Swiss company since its foundation as a backup company in Singapore in 2003. Just over 10 years later, in 2014, it transitioned from an on-premises solution provider to a cloud backup provider for MSPs with the launch of a multi-tenant cloud platform it had built from scratch.
In 2019, it responded to the threat of ransomware by launching a new platform, Cyber Protect, that natively integrated security and back-up in one platform, with one agent.
Later, it added new security features (EDR, MDR, XDR, email security) and, in 2024, new operational capabilities, notably RMM and PSA.
Now, it is responding to the challenges and opportunities 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, while making sure that AI is protected and secured at every layer, without the need for MSPs to master additional tools and dashboards.
The first solutions to take advantage of this underlying framework are:
Cyber Studio – a no code platform for building any workflow or AI automation; and
Cyber Intelligence – a native, AI‑powered platform embedded into the cyber platform that connects all services and is thus effectively the first step towards autonomous cybersecurity.
Acronis is also using the new platform to enhance support for partners. By embedding the partner portal into the platform, Acronis allows MSPs to see all aspects of the company’s new product- led cyber programme without having to switch between consoles; and, through 18 Cyber Intelligence, allows AI to present sales opportunities surfaced by analysis of data from an MSP’s tenants.
Another significant development 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 (RMM), Cyber Frame gives services providers an opportunity to regain control of their infrastructure strategy and margins at a time of disruption in legacy virtualisation, rising hyperscaler costs and growing demand for regional and sovereign cloud solutions.
Partners can choose between a fully hosted option, Acronis Cyber Frame Cloud, enabling rapid time to market with no upfront infrastructure investment, and Acronis Cyber Frame Local, a partner- hosted deployment model providing full control over infrastructure, economics, performance and data location.
On May 21, Technology Reseller discussed these developments with Acronis CEO Jan-Jaap (JJ) Jager at the Acronis Cyber Day in London.
Technology Reseller (TR): 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 the internet, 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. It took a little longer. 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’re not focused on IT. They’re focused on different things and will come to MSPs for help with AI. We see this as a huge opportunity.
TR: 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. I think everybody’s missing this key point – the opportunity doesn’t lie in what you can do for yourself, but in what you can do for your customers. They need the most help.
MSPs need to become trusted advisors on how to use AI and operate in an AI‑first world. That’s the incredible growth opportunity that people are still missing.
In our industry everybody talks about what they are going to offer, what they are going to implement, what agent they are going to build. Nobody is talking about how they are going to solve the fundamental problem that there will be thousands of agents that will all need to be orchestrated. That’s the biggest challenge we have: how are we going to help MSPs manage, orchestrate and control not tens, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of agents and workloads and different types of services.
Right now, while not exactly in panic mode, everybody is desperate to get started. The risk is that they forget the foundational things that Acronis has always tried to do a little bit differently. In providing services like backup, MDR, XDR, ransomware protection and so on, we always come back to the fact that the key element that differentiates us is that everything is connected. We have one platform and, regardless of what you offer on the front end, all the orchestration, the automation, the security, the compliance is at the platform level. We’re very excited about the advantage this gives us at a time when things are moving so fast.
TR: How else is Acronis adapting its offering to help MSP customers benefit from AI?
JJ: Over the last two decades, we have been through multiple transformational shifts. We started as a backup company in 2003. Then we entered the cloud space. Then we went into the cyber protection space, because front-end protection to prevent something from happening was better than trying to recover after the fact. Then we added management and automation, because people started scaling and wanted endpoint efficiency. The next generation is our AI-first platform.
As we have done in the past, we have completely rebuilt our core Cyber Protection platform from scratch to facilitate an AI-first approach. We’re not trying to bolt on something with a new service and later put AI on top of it. We’re trying to tackle it from the beginning. It took a little bit longer to get there, but we believe that having an AI-first foundation is the best way to make sure you have an AI platform that can scale with whatever you would like to do in the future.
TR: Having created an AI-first platform, you have now launched Cyber Studio and Cyber Intelligence. What is their value to your partners?
JJ: Cyber Studio is a no-code AI platform on top of our core platform that creates the automation needed for whatever you would like AI to do. Let’s say you would like to develop an AI agent to optimise a recurring workload or recurring task. You need to learn how to create an agent, then figure out which code you would like to use or which kind of program. You need to make sure it’s implemented in your daily operations. You need to make sure it’s compliant, secure, backed up – all those key things that are going to be incredibly important to ensure you don’t create an agent that goes rogue. Cyber Studio does that in a very simple way. It helps you to create the agent that will then be able to serve as a productivity enhancement in your company.
More than that, as an MSP you can say ‘Dear customer, you have this particular process we can help you with; we can develop an agent for you very quickly based on your specific needs, and we will operate that for you as an MSP’. The MSP doesn’t have to think about how to integrate that with its core platform, how to provision it, how to build it, how to make it compliant and based on roles and departments.
In Cyber Studio, you define the opportunity you see to improve your or your customer’s business and then make a very simple agent, completely integrated, to help with that. It also has a catalogue of predefined agents that MSPs can use both to market their own agents and to find agents developed by third parties.
In the future, we won’t be speaking of ten or one hundred agents, but one thousand agents. Alt‑Tech in Canada, one of the most advanced AI MSPs that we have in our portfolio, has already created1,000 agents. They have started creating agents to control agents, because some of the agents were being abusive to each other. If you do not have a really great foundation in place, how do you control that, and how do you manage that, and how do you set the workflow and orchestration in the right way?
Another key feature of AI Studio is that we are not trying to close it down. Some vendors say the best way of using our AI is to make sure you use our services. Right now, this is such a large, undefined ecosystem I don’t believe that closing things down will enable you to serve customers in the best possible way.
The concept with all our services is to make sure third-party agents or services can be connected to us. We know there are 150,000 to 200,000 MSPs out there and we have 20% of them. The remaining 80% have different technologies and they should not have to give them up but be able to integrate them in some way. That is even more important from an intelligence layer perspective.
You hear a lot about how AI will help you make more sense of the data you have and how you operate. I believe AI is not about intelligence. AI is not about making another dashboard or a report about the information you have in your company to help you reach a decision. AI should be making the decision for you. If you have AI connected to your core platform and to all your different types of service, it can help you to become more autonomous.
That’s what we call Cyber Intelligence. It’s not about the information or the intelligence that you get out of it, it’s the first step to becoming autonomous, because with intelligence you can create an action. If I see that a particular customer has been subject to more spam or more attempted hacks I would normally go to the client with the information and say this is what our intelligence shows, I suggest enhancing your email security or endpoint security to prevent an attack from succeeding. With Cyber Intelligence you don’t have to do that. It will say this is the action I would take based on the information I have. Would you like to execute? And you can click on it, and it executes automatically to make sure that the user is protected straight away.
AI Studio lets you define how much control you want. For any step of the process, you can add a manual intervention to check things and give the OK to move on. But that will not always be necessary. For example, a recurring problem in the MSP world is poor endpoint performance, usually because a task has taken a lot of resources and just needs to be killed, rebooted or changed. Often a non-technical person will call the MSP who will then look into it. With Cyber Intelligence and Cyber Studio, you can build a workflow with an agent that basically says we’ve seen this before and starts executing automatically without anybody being involved. Action rather than just information.
TR: Is it your vision that ultimately a machine will be able to do everything autonomously?
JJ: I don’t think machines can do everything. There are still certain things in life today that can’t be done by an agent. When we optimise our processes we’re not trying to reduce costs but to do things faster, because that’s what’s demanded. Twelve months ago we built a three-year roadmap and half of that roadmap will be delivered six to 12 months earlier than we had planned.
The biggest opportunity for our MSPs is how they drive their business, because MSPs are some of the most challenged service providers out there. Normally, a service has 30% margin, MSPs take between 10% and 20% margin, so they’re really working on the edge. Alt-Tech in Canada manages 500 endpoints per technician. The MSPs in this room today will, on average, do 200 to 300. So Alt‑Tech already does double the average and in the next 12 to 18 months it expects to reach 1,000 endpoints per technician. Their efficiency will help them win more customers and serve customers better.
In a session we ran last week, Alt-Tech said ‘AI, for me, is not about operational efficiency, it’s about making humans human again’. As a human, you can think differently and you can engage on an emotional level with customers that will enable you to assess their business operations and come up with ways in which they could be optimised. That’s true value, not doing the same task over and over again.
Small medium businesses are looking for a trustworthy partner, and the people that innovate will have more time to spend with customers and build trusted relationships.
TR: How is Acronis using AI to enhance its own operations?
JJ: We are doing a couple of things. One is in finance. Normally we close out the month, and then do all our calculations, reporting and so on. That can take anywhere between six and 10 days. We now do that in three. The outcome is still the same; we just do it faster.
Engineering is probably the best example. When we started using AI for engineering, we saw that people very quickly became more productive, generating not 100 lines of code, let’s say, but 150. Projects that used to take six months can now be done in four months, allowing us to launch features and functions faster.
This is why it is so important not to use AI to reduce your workforce but to enable you to do more in less time. Our main goal is to use AI to develop new solutions faster and to build the protection customers need more quickly, because adversaries will also be exploiting AI to go faster.
TR: How does Cyber Frame fit into your AI-first approach?
JJ: Today, infrastructure is a major thing. Everything goes in the cloud and we protect it. You build your cloud infrastructure or you go to a cloud provider and then connect your disaster recovery, your back up, your security, your automation, your management, all those challenges, with one dashboard, one vendor. MSPs like simplicity, they like having things connected and integrated. We try to integrate as much as possible, but over time a lot of our vendors and MSPs have said how can you make this easier for us.
Cyber Frame was a natural 22 development for us because we have built infrastructure for 40 years. Our disaster recovery is purely infrastructure to replicate what you have somewhere else. We have 50 data centres around the world where you can deploy it, and the moment you deploy you don’t have to worry about protection, because it’s included. That’s simplicity.
At the same time, you can deploy it on-premises with the same infrastructure management, the same agent. The whole sovereign movement we have seen lately, where people say, yes, I have infrastructure in the cloud, but I would like to have secondary infrastructure on-premises or just more control is the reason we started.
There’s another reason why this is very important. If you look at all the AI infrastructure out there, at the big five that control the vast majority of it, the challenge is how do you control this? In April, we launched GenAI Protection for the simple reason that people have no knowledge, no control, no management capabilities and no idea what their employees are doing in AI and no idea if private information is going to be used for model training. That all comes back to not controlling the infrastructure.
GenAI puts a layer on top that basically gives you visibility into employees’ use of AI – what tools they are using, how much they are using them, whether they have the right settings, whether they are sharing confidential information. It can also block confidential information from being sent. This is so important because in the future, people will want to own their own infrastructure running an LLM model with local control. With Cyber Frame we can start serving GPU-type infrastructure on premises, letting customers run their own models for training on their own dataset within their company. It’s at a very early stage but the potential market is huge.
TR: Has Cyber Frame been well received by partners?
JJ: It’s the most successful launch we’ve ever done. We have more than 1,000 partners signed up to the early adopter programme, and two thirds of them are not even Acronis partners. Most that come to us are saying I have two platforms and with Cyber Frame I can do what I do with one. It’s about making sure you have a complete package and don’t have to worry about security after you take infrastructure, because it’s built in and natively integrated.
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