INTERVIEW
DEFENDING YOUR BUSINESS FROM CYBER THREATS SERGUEI BELOUSSOV, CEO OF ACRONIS, EXPLAINS WHY ENTERPRISES NEED ALL-IN-ONE CYBER PROTECTION TO WARD OFF CYBER-ATTACKS. figure out why it happened in the first place. It could be a faulty hardware or software, the bad guys or good users who made a mistake. Security is just one aspect of it.
A
Are DDoS and ransomware the most prominent attack vectors now? The DDoS attack has become more common, and the industry has become better at mitigating it. Besides, the bad guys don’t really make any money out of it, but they do it from ransomware attacks. We notice that attacks have become more automated and integrated, combining ransomware with phishing and data privacy attacks.
cronis is talking about cyber protection. What does it represent? How can you stop ransomware attacks? It is not enough to have just It is a never-ending problem. You can’t security or data protection stop it, but you can dramatically decrease – what you need is cyber protection, which the damage. Basically, what you need is comprises security, backup, DR, and prevention, detection, response, recovery, endpoint management. At the same time, forensics – all in one platform. Ransomware when it comes to backup, you shouldn’t attacks are dangerous even in cases where think only about recovery. Ten years back, you can recover data. And if you don’t the focus was on restore and in the last do forensics, it can be repeated. It would five years, it’s changed to recovery. Now, ngapore citizen, than two dozen companies around be the world, best if you did everything to detect youthe founder also needof more to think about prevention, nder and Chairman of excessive Acronis Board of Directors of the data protection detection, and response. When you have Acronis, Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder of Parallels,these attacks in real-time and stop them, unding Partner of Runayou Capital, Phystech Ventures and Qwave Capital butventure it is not always possible. However, if a breach, need to detect and respond 1995 he left Russia to Singapore and became a your business has a good defence and quickly without ever needing recovery. And nt Singaporean Technology entrepreneur. prevention mechanism, the bad guys would should you ever need to recover, you also in Computer Science instead attack someone else because there need forensics to find out what happened Computer Science hysics and Electrical Engineering, cum laude are plenty of easy targets around. and make sure it doesn’t happen again. So hysics, cum laude to summarise, it is not just about backup ed 200+ (USPTO), H-index of 26 Do you think AI will drive the future and recovery but cyber protection, which of cybersecurity? is all about safety, accessibility, privacy, AI is an overused word, and it just a tool authenticity, and security. like object-oriented programming or common language runtime. It is going What is the difference between to be used everywhere, and it will play a cybersecurity and cyber protection? crucial role in preventing attacks. In fact, it It combines cybersecurity with backup, would be impossible to imagine any non-AI DR, endpoint management, vulnerability prevention technologies in the near future. assessment, penetration testing, and But is it important to remember bad guys so on. It is a complete package. If your will also use AI in cyber-attacks. system is broken, you have to fix it and
B (Serguei Beloussov)
Can you tell us more about your Cyber Protect Cloud offering? Cyber Protect is not a cloud offering but a product that we offer as a cloud service, and you can also install it on-premise. Of course, the best way to use it is over the cloud because that makes it easy to manage. Three years ago, people said they don’t trust the cloud, but now they realised the only way to get fully protected is to migrate to the cloud. That’s when you get professionally managed data centre, perimeter, workloads, which you can’t do in-house because of a skills shortage. Cyber Protect combines backup, DR, remote management, and many other security tools. It also integrates authenticity and privacy management in a single agent, UI, and policy, and is easy to use. For businesses, what really matters is their applications and systems, and they shouldn’t spend too much time on security it should be really easy to use. Is the cloud inherently more secure? We have seen some SaaS providers also getting hacked recently, like in the case of SolarWinds. What was compromised was their onpremise product, not a cloud-based one. We are headquartered in Switzerland, and we were always paranoid about protection. Suddenly, the bad guys have realised that it is more lucrative to attack the vendor. When you attack a vendor, you target every customer at once. Nevertheless, vendors are still better protected than their customers. What kind of backup approach do you recommend- full, incremental, or synthetic? It depends on your business. The best approach is continuous data protection, but it is more expensive and taxing on your systems. I will give you an analogy – when you are sick, you are super protected in ICU, but do you want to spend all your life there? Our recommendation is to use a managed service provider who can understand your situation and develop the best protection plan for you. We have many MSP partners in this region, and this year, we expect 20-30 percent growth in the MSP partner ecosystem. We also have five distributors here, and we are planning to set up 111 data centres globally over the next couple of years, and several of them will be in the GCC.
MAY 2021
CXO INSIGHT ME
23
