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.

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.

How can you stop ransomware attacks?

It is a never-ending problem. You can’t stop it, but you can dramatically decrease the damage. Basically, what you need is prevention, detection, response, recovery, forensics – all in one platform. Ransomware attacks are dangerous even in cases where you can recover data. And if you don’t do forensics, it can be repeated. It would be best if you did everything to detect these attacks in real-time and stop them, but it is not always possible. However, if your business has a good defence and prevention mechanism, the bad guys would instead attack someone else because there are plenty of easy targets around.

Do you think AI will drive the future of cybersecurity?

AI is an overused word, and it just a tool like object-oriented programming or common language runtime. It is going to be used everywhere, and it will play a crucial role in preventing attacks. In fact, it would be impossible to imagine any non-AI prevention technologies in the near future. But is it important to remember bad guys will also use AI in cyber-attacks.

Acronis is talking about cyber protection. What does it represent?

It is not enough to have just security or data protection – what you need is cyber protection, which comprises security, backup, DR, and endpoint management. At the same time, SB (Serguei Beloussov) when it comes to backup, you shouldn’t think only about recovery. Ten years back, the focus was on restore and in the last five years, it’s changed to recovery. Now, is a Singapore citizen, the founder of more than two dozen companies around the world, you also need to think about prevention, CEO, founder and Chairman of excessive Acronis Board of Directors of the data protection company Acronis, Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder of Parallels, detection, and response. When you have Senior Founding Partner of Runa Capital, Phystech Ventures and Qwave Capitala breach, you need to detect and respond venture funds. In 1995 he left Russia to Singapore and became a prominent Singaporean Technology entrepreneur.quickly without ever needing recovery. And should you ever need to recover, you also D. Sc. h.c. in Computer Science Ph. D. in Computer Scienceneed forensics to find out what happened M. S. in Physics and Electrical Engineering, cum laude B. S. in Physics, cum laudeand make sure it doesn’t happen again. So filed 200+ (USPTO), H-index of 26 to summarise, it is not just about backup and recovery but cyber protection, which is all about safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security.

What is the difference between cybersecurity and cyber protection?

It combines cybersecurity with backup, DR, endpoint management, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and so on. It is a complete package. If your system is broken, you have to fix it and

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.