Blockchain for data integrity and regulatory compliance
In a well-timed release Acronis has announced its Backup 12.5 product with automated ransomware protection and data integrity checking via blockchain.
Acronis Backup 12.5 comes in two editions – Standard and Advanced – with an easy in-place upgrade by changing licence keys. We might think of the Standard edition for smaller businesses and Advanced for Enterprise use.
Partners effectively sell the same product to both groups with the edition value set by a licence key.
The company says 50,000 users adopted Acronis Backup 12 Standard released in July 2016. That release supports more than 20 platforms, including Windows, Office 365, Azure, Linux, Mac OS X, Oracle, VMWare, Hyper-V, Red Hat Virtualization, Linux KVM, Citrix XenServer, iOS, and Android. If they all upgrade then that’s a nice little earner.
What’s 12.5 got? Quite a lot. Some 500 engineers worked on it and here’s what they added:
- Customisable dashboards for quick insights into the backup infrastructure
- Acronis Active Protection to intelligently detect and block ransomware attacks with instant restoration of any compromised data
- Acronis Instant Restore for 15-second RTOs
- Acronis vmFlashBack for quick incremental recovery of virtual machines’ admin roles and delegations for distributed infrastructures
- Acronis Notary to prove a file is authentic and unchanged since it was backed up and before restoration
- Support for six hypervisors to provide migration platform options
- Bare-metal recovery automation and remote boot media control to reduce RTO of remote site recovery
- SAN storage snapshots to reduce hypervisor resource utilisation
- Oracle backup and granular recovery
- Better tape support for more granularity and simplified management
- Better reporting for detailed insights and corporate compliance
- Disaster recovery capability for emergency data recovery locally and in the cloud
- Backup validation process ensures recoverability
- Backup of Amazon EC2 instances, Microsoft Azure VMs and Office 365 mailboxes
- Unified touch-friendly management console
The product uses blockchain technology to improve regulatory compliance and data integrity.
Acronis is pleased with the product’s ease of use. Jason Buffington, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced is the world’s first enterprise-grade data protection solution with a consumer-grade user interface.”
With the monster list of features in Backup 12.5, Acronis has raised the ability of its partners to respond to competition from ArcServe, Barracuda, Code42, Rubrik, Unitrends and the myriad other players in the backup and recovery data protection space.
Originally posted The Register 31 May 2017