Acronis' Evolution in Cybersecurity (EP 810)

James Abercrombie Stereo Mix-auphonic
[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv back at ASCII Edge in Orlando. We are getting close to wrapping up day two here and I have another interview with someone from Acronis. I've got technology evangelist James Abercrombie chatting with me here and if you ever get to see James in person, the beard is real.

[James Abercrombie]
There's a reason why they call me the cyber beard, Marv.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to say there was a reason they call you the evangelist.

[James Abercrombie]
I think that the word evangelist is kind of a fun one, right? Because obviously there's so many different connotations behind it but I love my job. I get to talk to different MSPs about the technologies that they use and learn about how Acronis can integrate with them and ensure that we're making it easier for them to use those Alright, so let's go back a little bit.

[Uncle Marv]
How long have you been with Acronis?

[James Abercrombie]
I've been with Acronis now seven years.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, so back in the days of... I knew Amy Luby as the evangelist back then.

[James Abercrombie]
And I was her SE. Okay. So that's how I got to know these events.

That's actually how I know who you are, because of Amy Luby. She helped me cut my teeth in the channel. Obviously I've been in the MSP space for a long time but this community is something that I wasn't a part of until Amy was, you know, part of my life.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Alright, so evangelist and specifically when you're here, I know a lot of it is just to talk to us, get us you know, signed up for demos, blah blah blah blah. But in terms of what you really gain from seeing MSPs out in the field, tell me about that.

[James Abercrombie]
Yeah, so I mean normally our involvement at these events would be MSP recruit. I myself am more interested in just having conversations to learn about, you know, what's working and what's not working. Not necessarily with Acronis, but with, you know, the entire stack that MSP is deploying.

Obviously I like to do demos. You know, I like to show people how they can leverage Acronis. But the conversations that I really cherish, like earlier I was talking to somebody who said that, you know, I would look at your solution if it was integrated with LUMU.

I was like, oh, we're having a conversation with them. He said, well once you're done and you have the integration built, come back and talk to me. And being able to take that real-life feedback and understand what it is that he's using LUMU for, so that we can then go and have an educated conversation with them and say, hey, we have an MSP who has a need.

This is the want. You know, this is what we believe we can deliver. Ultimately, if I can make it easier for an MSP's technician to accomplish a job, you know, in a shorter amount of time than they would if they had to go from console to console, that's my end goal, right?

I want to find out what's going to make it easier for your business to scale, and I want to help you do that.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. That is one of the things that I have liked about all the people that I've met, the vendors that I talk to on a regular basis. It's not about the sell, sell, sell mentality.

It's let's just talk, let's just figure out what is it that we need to do to get better at what we do. And, you know, I can't use every tool. Nope.

But I don't mind talking to you about how you do business and how, you know, we do business and what works and what doesn't.

[James Abercrombie]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
It's just great to have that conversation.

[James Abercrombie]
Having that peer to peer feedback, you know, and obviously there's a lot of solutions that have overlap. You know, we overlap with a lot of different solutions. And people ask me often, “You know, who is our competitor?

You know, it depends on what space you're talking about, right? But nobody is truly a competitor of us in a whole sense.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, but it's a big difference for you now because back in the day, people only knew Acronis as the backup company.

[James Abercrombie]
As a true image, yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
And then, of course, you added the cyber protect feature. So you added the ransomware and RMM. And I know a lot of people are like, what's Acronis doing adding an RMM?

But there was a reason behind all of that.

[James Abercrombie]
Yeah. Everything that we've done as a company has been a true evolution from the need of an MSP, right? Obviously, storage is one thing.

Nobody wants to manage their storage anymore. It's a lot to maintain. You have to worry about the health of the disk.

You have to ensure that you've got enough storage available, that you've got it rated properly, yada, yada. If you can offload that to somebody else, great. Let's talk about it.

And that's, I think, kind of, you know, how we started stepping stone into where we are today, right? It was just backup. It was imaging.

It saved a lot of bacon for a lot of break fix. But when we start talking about where you store those backups, that's when people start getting a little bit hesitant, right? It's normally like a NAS or, you know, maybe a SAN.

But then they start worrying about that offsite location and what they can do with that data after it's offsite. I can't tell you how many other solutions I've spoken with that they export their data, right? And they make it so that you can put it in an offsite location.

But when the time comes that you need to use that data, they can't rehydrate it, right? There's nothing that they can do with it.

[Uncle Marv]
Or it comes at a very steep price because people are doing the cheap storage costs. And then to get that down, the cost is twice or triple what you thought it was going to be.

[James Abercrombie]
Your ingress and your egress fees come out of nowhere.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, so that was always a thing. And I know that I've looked at that because I've got, to give full disclosure, I've had backup data for a long time. So that was one thing that, you know, storage.

But then I've also used products where I would select my storage, whether it was a, you know, an Azure S3 Cloud, Wasabi or whatever. And yeah, those are great if you don't need to access them. If you just need to check a box.

You don't need it quick.

[James Abercrombie]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
But to get it back, it's going to take some time. You go ahead. You were going to say something.

[James Abercrombie]
So, I mean, with the storage, right? You know, it used to be that you could just use something locally or you could use the Acronis Cloud. You know, we have a partnership with Google, with Azure, also Wasabi, you know, and other storage solutions.

Storage, S3 compatible, public storage, you know, any of those you can go to. But some of the benefits that you're getting out of going to our hosted cloud, right? Our data center is that we've got infrastructure there to spin up a virtual machine.

So if you were to have a full site outage, right? You know, it's great that you have Hyper-V or VMware on site and you can spin up there. But if you're underwater, we're in Florida, right?

That's a possibility. How are you going to continue to run your business? And that's where we purchased a company called N-Scaled and that's our disaster recovery service.

It's a disaster recovery as a service. Essentially, you know, any of the backups that you store in our cloud, as long as it's a full image, can be spun up as a VM. And that could be a site-to-site connection.

It could be a point-to-site connection. You can access it via VPN. It's really, it's pretty simple and straightforward.

So again, if you're doing backups, right? You got to follow the 3-2-1 rule. But then we start talking about the recovery and the disaster recovery plans and how you actually test these things.

And, you know, having the ability to spin it up in a virtual machine in the cloud versus having to carve out, you know, resources in your lab makes it a little simpler. It makes it more feasible for you to do those tests.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, and that was always the hang-up is, yes, you can check off the box of doing the backup, but the real test is, can you recover?

[James Abercrombie]
Mm-hmm. A backup's only as good as what you can recover from it.

[Uncle Marv]
Can you prove that you can recover it without having to, you know, I think the hardest problem that I had with some customers is the real way to test it, let's take a server offline and see if we can get you back up and going.

[James Abercrombie]
Which is, you know, that's going to impact business, right? And, you know, if we can find a way to limit the impact to the business in a negative way, right? Then we're all for it.

And that's the reason why we've taken those stepping stones from just being backup into being, you know, a full MSP platform and saying, all right, well, we've got backup, we've got storage, what else can we do? All right. And as threat actors, we're going after backups to ensure that the ransom's paid.

We're able to say, hold on, hold on, hold on. You're not going to go after our backups. We're going to safeguard this somehow.

So that's where we started stepping into the whole security arena, if you will, right? We had a functionality called active protection. So as we're tracking the blocks that are changing to commit a backup, we're able to revert those as well.

If it's, you know, a weird or anomalous process that's just unbeknownst to us. So instead of having to isolate a system, wait for somebody to call you, say, hey, what's going on? And then in there.

And that's been a game changer for my MSP friends.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. I remember when that came out. That was huge.

Almost made me switch over.

[James Abercrombie]
That's a good reason.

[Uncle Marv]
And then I know that you've added some other stuff. And to be honest, I've seen you guys at some conferences. We've not had to sit down, like I said, since Amy Luby.

So beyond active protection, what else have you guys added?

[James Abercrombie]
Yeah. So we've added in some EDR, some XDR, right? We've partnered with folks at Pillar and OpenText to offer MDR services.

In addition to being able to protect all workloads, right? Windows, Mac, Linux, all that good stuff, Android, iOS. We're also doing M365, Google Workspace, ensuring that not only are your mailboxes, your OneDrive’s, your Teams, your SharePoint protected, but we also have email security on top of that to ensure that the emails that are coming through are unpacked, kind of being, you know, deconstructed, if you will, to ensure that those threats aren't getting through.

And then, obviously, if some threat does get through because somebody has clicked on a link that they shouldn't have clicked on, we also have security awareness training built in as well. So this is all in one console, right? One agent, one protection plan.

What got me converted to Acronis as a technologist is that there was no reboot necessary to be able to back up a system. If you've ever done a proof of concept for a customer and you have to carve out, you know, a maintenance window for you just to do a demo, it kind of hinders the sales cycle. And it's not necessarily about a sales cycle.

For me, it's about proving to you the value of what you're using, you know, a proof of value, a proof of, you know, concept. It's the same thing for me.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. All right. So I'm going to ask a question that I think some people who are not familiar with Acronis are going to say, really, one agent?

[James Abercrombie]
Really one agent.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[James Abercrombie]
Really one agent. There may come a time where there's a secondary agent for some of the security stuff. But as of now, it's one agent, low resources, low overhead, and again, no reboot necessary.

[Uncle Marv]
And that's for your local server backups, that's your cloud backup. And you mentioned, you know, SharePoint and stuff. So is that where you're taking a SharePoint environment or sites to a secondary cloud location?

Or can you download them also to a local NAS if you want to?

[James Abercrombie]
It can be stored. Right now, it's cloud to cloud. We do have our M365, I think it's called Ultimate, which will allow you to also backup locally as well.

But yeah, so the idea here is that as long as it's cloud to cloud, we can do redundancy as to where it's in more than one cloud location. If you want to point to a secondary S3 target, not a problem.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Now, I know you mentioned the spinning up of VM in the cloud. So if something happened at the primary SaaS location, SharePoint, is it just a click to move them over to the backup site?

[James Abercrombie]
So when we're talking about SharePoint, right, it's a click to get those sites recovered back to the original location. We're not going to spin up a whole new Microsoft tenant for them and migrate. Now, that's something that you could technically do.

I've seen a lot of people utilize Acronis in the sense of backing up a physical system and then migrating to the cloud. But when we're talking about M365, like applications, it's more about just recovering the data that's being utilized by the application.

[Uncle Marv]
Sweet. All right. I know you guys have got some other stuff new or some things coming up.

What else is on the agenda?

[James Abercrombie]
So it's been kind of under wraps in the sense of we've been calling it advanced automation. And the idea here is that we did not want to step on toes of some of our partners. And obviously, as the landscape changes, we realize that people just don't understand what advanced automation is.

So we do have a professional service automation. We do have remote monitoring and management. We've had these solutions in place for a while, but not fully to where you need an RMM.

But now we do. We've had scripting. We've had remote access.

We've had software deployment. But we needed the workflow automation. So with the workflow automation being released, we now have a fully-blown RMM solution.

And then with the PSA, right, we've got your product list, right? So your catalog, if you will. You put in the prices.

You create your agreements for the different companies. We've got service desks that you can assign those tickets to the proper technicians and make sure that that time is being tracked as well. So again, it's about making sure that the MSP is able to meet and exceed their clients' needs without having to cobble together multiple solutions.

And a lot of feedback that I get is, you know, why put all your eggs in one basket? Well, it's not necessarily all your eggs in one basket. It's all your eggs in one kind of shopping cart, if you will.

And saying, all right, you can use other solutions. I've got no problem with you utilizing, say, Datto or, say, Bitdefender or, say, Huntress. The idea here is to integrate with these technologies to make it so that the technicians can leverage the information to do their job better.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. All right. That sounds good.

So I'm not going to say any other vendors' names that you might be talking about, but all sounds good. All right. And then I did speak with your other gentleman, and we talked about the Acronis Academy.

We talked about the MSP Academy. And all of that seems to be flowing together real nicely with somebody being able to come in and not just do the job, but a business owner can learn, you know, how to run the business.

[James Abercrombie]
Business owners can learn how to run a business. Marketers can learn how to market. Support people can learn how to support.

I think that it's a great next step in the evolution of what we're doing, right? In saying, look, you can hire whomever you need to hire. It doesn't have to be a specific skill set because we can upskill them.

You know, we can give them the skills that they need, whether they're coming off the street, whether they're coming from Best Buy's Geek Squad, or, you know, whatever it may be. Obviously, it's nice to have somebody who's got a special interest and, you know, their superpower, right? But then you have to worry about losing that technician who has that superpower.

Absolutely. And then how that knowledge gets passed on to the next generation of technicians. But, you know, being able to upskill your technicians, being able to get them all trained on one platform that kind of allows them to manage all of their stack, like I said, it seems like the proper evolution.

[Uncle Marv]
It is. It is. Well, James, it's good to have you here over the table.

And it's interesting to hear that my name has preceded me by Amy Luby talking to you. Yeah. It's interesting.

You never know what gets said about you, right?

[James Abercrombie]
It's always been good. You know, I was introduced to the Uncle Morph podcast due to Amy. And again, you know, it's nice that, you know, you've got people who are singing your praises, right?

You know, obviously you're doing something right. And that's why we're here talking to you.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I'm just a microphone. I let people talk.

[James Abercrombie]
A good conduit.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. And people are listening to the show, so I appreciate that. Thank you for coming and sharing.

And I mean, listen, coming to these events, it is nice to be able to not just meet with peers and stuff, but to be able to see vendors that are happy to be here.

[James Abercrombie]
Mm hmm.

[Uncle Marv]
So I'm ecstatic that you guys are happy to be here.

[James Abercrombie]
Well, as you said, you know, we met through Amy and Amy was with Acronis I think about two years ago. Right. And I was on the road with her at all of these shows.

And it's just the community that you build, the people that you meet, the relationships that are growing. The logos may change on shirts, but the people stay the same.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes. Right.

[James Abercrombie]
And being able to create that lasting relationship where it's like, hey, I've learned about this new technology. I think you'd be a great fit over here. Or I think that, you know, you could increase your profits by utilizing this or something along those lines.

Those are the kind of conversations that you're not having at the coffee shop, right? You're having them at these events. Yes, absolutely.

[Uncle Marv]
So, all right, James, we will be in touch again. I'm sure I will see you on the road.

[James Abercrombie]
And one last bit. We do have a security event that's coming up here in Boston. May 22nd, I think at Seaport.

I'll send you some information on it, but it's a free event for MSPs to come and join. We'll probably have about 150 to 200 people there. But it's called our Threat Research Unit Day.

Essentially, we're having people come in, understand how we are analyzing threats, how we're mitigating them, how we are remediating them.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. It's an in-person event in Boston.

[James Abercrombie]
In-person event in Boston. I will be there with my team. If you want to come and meet me or if you want to come and learn about how we are providing you guys the best value that we possibly can, come and join us in Boston, May 22nd.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Is there an easy way to find that if they go to the Acronis website?

[James Abercrombie]
Yeah, I think it's events.acronis.com. Either way, I'll send you the information. We can get it posted.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I'll get that on the show notes when this gets released. Obviously, folks, I'm not releasing in real time because I'm here enjoying the show.

But by the time you hear this, all the links will be there and I'll have more information for that event as well as all the Acronis stuff that sounds really fascinating and you guys should take a look at. So again, James Abercrombie, tech evangelist for Acronis. And check him out if you are coming to any of the other ASCII events.

Are you going to be the rest of the seven?

[James Abercrombie]
I believe I'll be at the rest of them as well.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. And then we'll definitely see you in Philly at the Cup.

[James Abercrombie]
100%.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, have a good time then and maybe a drink or two. So take care.

James, thanks a lot. Folks, we'll see you. Signing off here from ASCII Edge in Orlando.

We'll see you soon. Holla!