WOBURN, Mass., Feb. 27 — Recognizing a serious shift in enterprise needs for data protection, Acronis today announced that it has expanded beyond the traditional backup and disaster recovery market to encompass a broader strategy for delivering secure data availability, accessibility and protection. The widespread adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, alongside tablets, smartphones and the Apple Mac within businesses significantly increases the risk of data loss and leakage, which cannot be prevented with conventional approaches using outdated technologies from legacy vendors. With its focus on the protection and movement of data, regardless of platform or environment, Acronis is presenting further expansion of its comprehensive platform to address this risk, easily, simply, and reliably for organizations of all sizes.

In 2012, Acronis' virtualization data protection business grew by nearly 60 percent worldwide. This, alongside Acronis' continued cloud business growth, is strong evidence of the demand for a more innovative, comprehensive platform that eliminates IT complexity and allows companies to establish one set of data protection policies, using one technology, across all environments. The increase in hybrid IT environments require new approaches to solve the data protection and availability problems these complex environments create.

"Companies are adopting new technologies faster than they can plan effective data protection strategies. Yet IT is responsible for data protection across all technologies and environments. After all, data can only be utilized if it can be securely accessed, protected and available regardless of platform or environment, tablet or smartphone," said Alex Pinchev, president and CEO, Acronis. "Acronis is delivering a comprehensive platform strategy that allows customers to more simply and reliably mitigate the risk to data in today's world, in ways no legacy vendor can. By keeping data at the center of our development effort, we focus on removing the constraints of hybrid environments by enabling the secure, protected movement of data while reducing risks of data loss and leakage."

The most recent developments include a new seamless architecture that enables organizations to integrate protection for data created on an Apple Mac platform, which was also announced today, as well as the extension of the Acronis Unified Platform to include new plugins for data-intensive applications such as Microsoft SQL Server which are increasingly moving to virtual environments.

"We see the forces of Big Data, virtualization, cloud and the growing population of workers with three or more disparate devices changing the landscape of data protection forever," commented Laura DuBois, program vice president for the Storage practice at IDC. "Our research shows that with the next wave of virtualization users will increasingly embrace multiple hypervisors in their environments. Organizations will be facing an increasingly complex management and security burden."

From the initial imaging product development in 2002, Acronis has always focused on the protection of data, regardless of platform or environment, enabling seamless movement and greater efficiency. The imaging technology central to Acronis innovation enables the granular availability of every object, file, machine or system — regardless of location. Acronis' Unified Platform, which supports all major hypervisors, has been on the market for nearly two years and is proven in thousands of networks worldwide. These latest extensions will bring greater flexibility to an organizations' ability to move, access and protect critical data.

About Acronis
Acronis is leading the next wave of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions to simplify today's complex IT environments. Acronis technology enables organizations of all sizes to manage the always-on anywhere data access demands of users, reducing risk against the loss of valuable corporate data, and controlling management and storage costs. With proven technology for data migration and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments, and secure enterprise file-sharing and synchronization regardless of type or platform, Acronis is enabling organizations to embrace new IT strategies and options such as BYOD and Mac in the enterprise.

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Source: Acronis