Pulvermueller (pictured) has three big items on his list of priorities for 2022, beginning with continued investment in what he calls a “pretty packed” list of upcoming products and enhancements.
“We are significantly increasing our headcount to deliver even more features in security and backup,” he says. “We are very confident we can deliver against the roadmap.”
Additional investment in partner support is on the way as well. This year alone, he says, Acronis has improved its time to response by 3x and cut its time to resolution by more than 50%. “We will continue that path,” Pulvermueller says.
Last but far from least, and starting in the U.S. within days, Acronis will begin spending big on a sprawling global constellation of hyper-local cloud data centers called the Acronis Cyber Network. Today, Pulvermueller notes, Acronis has 38 data centers, including 14 added in just the last 12 months. When the Cyber Network is fully in place, it will have hundreds of them.
“We are not only going to be in your region, but we truly want to be in your neighborhood,” said Pulvermueller yesterday during a CyberFit Summit keynote. “We want to be as close to the workloads, the data, the systems, the applications we are protecting as possible to really boost the performance.”
Reducing the distance between compute facilities and end users improves reliability too, Pulvermueller adds. It also, significantly, lowers digital transit times between the Acronis cloud and the Acronis agents on endpoints, allowing the company to roll out artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that can block new threats as they appear, but that are too resource-intensive to run directly on endpoints.
“These are real-time interactions that can happen, but they are latency critical,” Pulvermueller observes. “If that brain, that artificial brain, is too far away, it just takes too long to tell the agent what to do.”
What’s an acceptable delay? Acronis believes that to fully realize its AI-powered cyber protection vision it must limit communication times between its cloud and the endpoints it protects to no more than 20 milliseconds round trip. Though the specific number will vary based on the quality of local broadband infrastructure, Pulvermueller notes, the Cyber Network will probably end up including enough locations to ensure that no customer is more than 250 miles away from an Acronis data center.
