MSPs will be able to manage more and bigger clients with fewer staff, claims Acronis, talking up its new machine learning-boosted management product, which also includes more automation for its backup and cyber-protection product.
The new features add to the Acronis data protection and security product set for its MSP (Managed Service Provider) channel partners. Acronis hired a new CEO, Patrick Pulvermueller, last year to help it increase sales through channel, particularly MSPs.
Yves Meier, executive board member at Acronis customer GMG, said: “Acronis Advanced Management allowed us to offer more proactive, preventative protection for our clients – which improves their satisfaction with our services, and saves my team a ton of time responding to problems.”
The Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud (CPC) for service providers combines backup and security, meaning anti-malware, antivirus, and endpoint protection management. CPC has a number of extra protection packs, all branded “Advanced” as in Advanced Security, with others including Backup, Disaster Recovery, Email Security, Disaster Loss Prevention, File Sync and Share, and Management.
CPC is a major product, being used by used by over more than 20,000 managed service providers in over 150 countries with 26 languages, and there are more than 750,000 business customers of these MSPs.
Acronis announced a Cyber Scripting feature for Advanced Management in July, providing a verified set of 40-plus scripts to automate common tasks. Customers could create or fine-tune existing scripts and add them to a script repository.
Advanced Management takes this further and automates an MSP’s routine tasks via scripting and patch management. It provides daily tracking visibility into clients’ software assets and data protection, and monitors disk drive health. The facility now gets machine learning-based automated remote monitoring for continuous anomaly detection as a general malware defense. This is adaptive and doesn’t require manual threshold setting, claims the company.
The patch management provides for rollback from automated backups in the event a patch fails. There is also better security protection on remote desktop and Cyber Scripting with two-factor authentication (2FA) and a new protocol using 2-way AES to prevent management tools from opening new vulnerabilities.
The Advanced Automation feature will help Acronis’ MSP partners integrate Acronis MSP customer’ back-office functions with Acronis service delivery, such as endpoint management. It has:
- Billing automation with support for consumption-based services
- SLA tracking, reporting and technician performance
- Support ticketing system
- Automatic, granular per-tenant tracking of billable and non-billable time
- Operational and profitability reporting and dashboards
- Support for multiple languages
- Centralized control and visibility from the Acronis console
This plan is to tempt channel partners with the idea they’d be better able to scale services to clients, integrate support ticketing , show clients which services were delivered, review SLAs, review staff utilization rates and performance, as well as do revenue forecasting.
Acronis will be releasing the Advanced Management update of Remote Desktop in December, and both the machine intelligence monitoring and new Advanced Automation product will arrive in the first quarter of 2023.
