Our friends at Acronis just completed the first-ever World Cyber Protection Week (March 30 – April 3), expanding on World Backup Day with a new celebration that raises awareness of modern IT challenges and the more robust cyber protection solutions that are needed to overcome them.

Today, we’re taking a look back at the inaugural event: why the change is so important in this day and age and what it means for your organization and your customers moving forward.

What is cyber protection?

If your first reaction to “World Cyber Protection Week” is “World what?” you aren’t alone. Cyber protection is a new approach to overcoming increasingly complex data protection and initiatives and threats that combines best practices from the world of data protection and the world of cybersecurity to offer a more comprehensive, integrated solution. IDC calls it the new IT discipline that organizations should be following.

To do that, Acronis offers a suite of cyber protection solutions that integrate traditionally disparate functions and workflows into a single UI. By doing so, it’s easier to balance the major (and often competing) IT data protection demands that all organizations face: ensuring the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security of their data, applications, and systems.

Acronis has been at the forefront of this movement since the beginning and analysts like IDC have been encouraging a move toward the cyber protection approach ever since. We forecast that this trend will only continue and accelerate throughout the industry, particularly as awareness of it grows. That brings us to this year’s shift from World Backup Day to World Cyber Protection Week.

Launching World Cyber Protection Week

For nearly a decade, tech consumers and SMBs have made a push for March 31 to be recognized as World Backup Day – a reminder to keep a copy of important files safe and avoid becoming an April Fool. Vendors, including Acronis and us, took part in the annual event to drive awareness of backup best practices. But, as Acronis argued this year, that’s not enough anymore.

Traditional backup and recovery processes – while an important part of protecting your organization’s data – don’t include cybersecurity measures to keep those backups safe, which is vital now that new ransomware strains specifically target backup files and solutions. They also don’t always extend to the wide variety of devices that your organization relies on and don’t keep management of all these processes unified, creating additional complexity for IT pros.

In 2020, when there’s a ransomware attack against a business every 10 seconds and a single hour of downtime could cost your organization as much as $300,000, those limitations represent a major problem. “The tech industry is at a pivotal moment,” said Gaidar Magdanurov, Chief Cyber Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Acronis. “With the complexity of modern IT environments and the sophistication of cyberattacks increasing, you can’t afford to rely on outdated solutions and strategies. With our complete cyber protection approach, we’re evolving digital defenses in response to these never-before-seen challenges. World Cyber Protection Week flows from the same logic – taking an established day of awareness and expanding it to better address the world we live in today.”

What this means for resellers

As the cyber protection approach grows in popularity, resellers can expect an increased focus on leveraging complete solutions. The patchwork of services and solutions that small-to-medium businesses have relied on historically have grown clunky, expensive, and difficult to manage. By offering cyber protection solutions, you can eliminate these challenges for your customers, making it easier to retain their business long term while generating new lines of revenue by adding key services that they had been finding outside of your service portfolio.

Learn more about the future of cyber protection and World Cyber Protection Week with Acronis here. Then get ahead of the curve and learn how you can start selling cyber protection solutions, yourself, here. REACH OUT to your Lifeboat rep today!