Acronis introduces Machine Intelligence and new Automation Toolset for MSPs

Live from its annual #CyberFit Summit, Acronis has introduced strategic updates to its Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud platform with a new product, Advanced Automation and innovative developments including the addition of Machine Intelligence (MI) to its Advanced Management solution.

Together, this expansion of the Acronis lineup will help managed service providers (MSPs) reduce complexity, stay focused on value-based service delivery, and provide the tools needed to ensure client businesses and their systems, data and applications are up and running productively, safely and securely.

For MSPs and their customers, there’s a major need for visibility, as 76% of security and IT teams struggle with no common view over applications and assets. MSPs must have this insight to be able to prevent unplanned downtime, and to identify and address IT problems that arise. In return, the MSP customer expectation is for fast response and comprehensive resolution. Downtime is expensive, and MSPs are beholden to service level agreements (SLAs) because of the impacts to client businesses.

With the announcement of updates to its Advanced Management product following the recent release of its Acronis Cyber Scripting solution, MSPs will now have access to a comprehensive, proactive endpoint management solution that provides:

• Machine Intelligence-based remote monitoring for continuous anomaly detection that is automated, adaptive and doesn’t require manual threshold setting.

• Fail-safe patch management via rollback from automated backups in the event a patch fails.

• Multi-vendor, prediction-based hard drive health monitoring.

• Several Remote Desktop developments allow performance over slow networks, both user and admin initiation, and added platform support for MacOS and Linux.

• Enhanced security protections on remote desktop and Cyber Scripting employing two-factor authentication (2FA) and a new protocol using 2-way AES to prevent management tools from opening new vulnerabilities.

These new capabilities work in combination with the broader Acronis platform that spans across security, backup and disaster recovery products, ensuring that MSPs and their clients meet expectations.

“As an MSP, I aim to provide the best customer experience for my clients who count on me to keep them up and running. But as you can imagine, I don’t have an unlimited budget to buy and run multiple backup, security and management products”, said Yves Meier, Executive Board Member at GMG. “Acronis provided me with a fully integrated solution that is easy to deploy, to learn, and to operate, which helps me to assist my customers. Moreover, 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.”

But improving IT management tools is only part of the equation. MSPs are constantly under pressure to deliver excellent customer experience while also keeping their margins healthy in a complex environment of consumption-based services on the market. While there are solutions available that can solve this, many are more sophisticated than some MSPs are ready for - or in some markets, MSPs do not have access to these solutions at all. 

This is a challenge for MSPs who are often manually pulling reports and reconciling contract line items with staff time, tickets and overhead – while needing to transparently show their customers clearly what services were delivered on the invoice, how SLAs were met, and how the invoiced services represent value for them.

With the upcoming release of Acronis Advanced Automation, Acronis is bringing native business automation onto its platform to help its MSP partners integrate their back-office functions with delivery of Acronis-based services, like endpoint management.  The new features include:

• 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 & dashboards

• Support for multiple languages

• Centralised control and visibility from the Acronis console

“Moving to consumption-based services has made our monthly billing much more complex and likely to have errors, leading to a lot of unnecessary and unproductive time ensuring accurate billing for our clients”, said Richard Daemen, Founder & Director at Daemen ICT. “We’ve looked at business automation tools to solve these problems, but some were just too limited while others were too complicated for what we need at this point. We’re looking forward to using this native integration of business automation tools to help manage our delivery of Acronis-based services from a single pane of glass.”

By combining the automation of services enabled from Acronis Advanced Management and other Acronis solutions with the power of business automation, MSPs will now be able to more efficiently scale effective services across their clients, integrate their support ticketing for faster response, transparently show their clients which services were delivered, review SLAs, and then review their staff utilisation rates, performance and revenue forecasting are in alignment to ensure both their business margins – and customer expectations – are met continuously.