Businesses globally are being targeted by cyberattacks, prompting a scramble to find as many cyber protection solutions as possible to keep assets and infrastructure safe. This overcomplexity in cybersecurity, however, only hurts companies in the long run, offering more potential points of failure for cyber terrorists to exploit.
Complexity isn’t only a security issue. There is also a level of complexity facing managed service provider (MSP) partners in terms of new business, training, managing multiple tools, onboarding times of new customers, and complying with industry regulations. In our Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global Report, we discovered that 78% of respondents rely on up to 10 different services and agents to defend their data, applications, and systems. This high number taxes time, money, and resources, with multiple services requiring high licensing costs, constant updating, and continuous maintenance—with our studies finding an average increase of 19% in cybersecurity spending in the past two years. Additionally, we found that 97% of MSPs surveyed believe remote work will make providing cybersecurity services challenging, exacerbated further by the introduction of too many vendors.
The world is more connected than ever before, with businesses globally entering a new era of work-from-home with the need to transform their entire infrastructure to meet the new age of technology. The pandemic accelerated these trends further and in part has created a need for increased digital services. As a result, the IT world is moving to the cloud, taking advantage of its scale, reliability, and cost-effectiveness, and leaving behind traditional on-prem solutions. With this mass migration, the volume and importance of data grew exponentially—with over 60% of all corporate data stored in the cloud. However, the massive increase in data, the jump in productivity, and the adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have also led to an increase in cybersecurity risks exponentially. As new cybersecurity risks emerge and evolve, the need for skilled talent expanded, with over 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs unfilled across the globe. To tackle this crisis, many businesses adopted a variety of cybersecurity solutions, with the belief that the more, the merrier—but when it comes to cyber protection, the opposite is true.
The value of simplicity
Many aspects in our lives have been simplified—after all, this is why “K.I.S.S.”, or “keep it simple, stupid” is such a popular mantra. When a company’s cybersecurity solution is overcomplicated, it makes attacks and breaches even more likely to occur. It might seem counter-intuitive, but the more vendors and software involved in security infrastructure, the more gaps and vulnerabilities are exposed to potential attackers. Increased complexity only leaves more surface for attacks to breach, and cyber terrorists are well aware of this—even expecting it. Cyberattackers are on top of the latest vulnerabilities and patches in security platforms, knowing what programs offer points of failure and how to strike. Companies aren’t always able to keep up with updating and patching their software, leading to these preventable attacks.
MSPs are tasked with maintaining and managing several different security agents, which can introduce complexity into their infrastructure, prompting many MSPs to be particular with the services they offer. For example, 89% of MSPs offer patch management and updates, but only 57% offer multi-factor authentication services and even fewer offer advanced endpoint security (54%).
The Acronis solution
Acronis combats this complexity by offering a single-agent platform, connected to almost 50 data centers around the world. Using one unified dashboard, we eliminate needless complexity and drastically reduce time spent configuring and updating services. With over 20,000 service providers and 750,000 business customers, our platform is also growing more and more each year, with new features and functionality added periodically as we work hard to stay on top of the latest developments in the cybersecurity world.
Based on our findings, customers who use Acronis see 35% fewer successful ransomware attacks—an especially staggering statistic when one considers the increasing threat ransomware poses on a connected society. Additionally, Acronis offers all its services in one simple and easy IT management platform. This platform offers 50+ integrations, 3-5x more than our competitors. Service providers using Acronis also reported the number of vendors they relied on decreased, on average, from seven to three. This also dramatically decreases the amount of time needed to deploy services, with our partners reporting an average of an hour or less needed.
In one case study we conducted, a company went from seven agents to only two agents after adopting Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. With this decrease, the user reported a marked increase in machine performance, with workstations across the company working much faster than before. The organization also reported that after integrating our platform into their infrastructure, the onboarding processing for new technicians was faster by over 50%, with the onboarding process for new clients over 20% faster than previously before. As a result of the decrease in time spent configuring its security infrastructure and training new talent, this company reported a 15% revenue growth.
Our Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of pre-built technology integrations available at our users’ disposal. These include backup and data recovery integrations, remote monitoring and management integrations, and service automation integrations. With all of these services available on one single agent, easy-to-use platform, Acronis saves our partners valuable time and resources that could otherwise be spent focusing on revenue and other critical aspects of a business.
Keeping your infrastructure simple might seem easier said than done, but there’s a plethora of resources waiting for you to use if you know where to look. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is specifically designed to keep your security solutions as simple as possible while keeping you protected and delivering the peace of mind you need. To get started, visit our website here and contact an Acronis representative as soon as possible. The sooner you get protected, the sooner you can focus on building your business into your vision and increasing your company’s profitability.
This guest blog is courtesy of Acronis. Read more Acronis guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of ChannelE2E’s sponsorship program.
