In an exclusive interview with CRN India, Katya Ivanova, Chief Sales Officer, Acronis, and Rajesh Chhabra, General Manager India (India Head) & Senior Director Partner Success APJ & MEA, Acronis, talk about how the company is growing in India and shaping digital transformation and cybersecurity. They talk about how Acronis’ integrated backup and security solutions, as well as innovations on AI, are helping businesses keep themselves safe in a digital-first world. The company has seen a great 88% growth in recurring revenue.
The interview also throws light upon the strategic significance of Acronis’ data centre in India, ensuring data sovereignty and compliance. In the future, they discuss about the scaling up of partnerships across smaller cities and further fight against ransomware with state-of-the-art solutions.
What are the trends in the global markets, specifically with regards to digital transformation and cybersecurity?
Katya Ivanova: We are over 20 years old, and we have been investing heavily in various regions, including India. We’ve seen a huge transformation in the global IT landscape for the last five years, mainly because of the pandemic. With COVID-19, digitalisation really gained momentum as companies had to shift towards remote operations. This trend also helped speed up the adoption of tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and cloud-based solutions from giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. But the migration of loads to the cloud increased the attack surface for threats such as cyber and drove the need for strong protection.
Acronis has been focused on holistic products that combine the ability to backup and have cybersecurity capabilities. For instance, we have advanced support for ecosystems such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, ensuring that those environments can be protected seamlessly.
Indeed, India is one of the standout markets for us. High GDP growth and digitisation in the country made it a focused region for investments. We have more than 500 service providers in India today and growing according to the demands for cybersecurity and IT services across various regions.
What has been the growth of Acronis in India and globally?
Katya Ivanova: Our fastest-growing market across the globe is India, with 88% year-over-year growth in recurring revenue for our service provider business. And the second-fastest market is Brazil-growing at 75%. Beyond revenue, we also see more than 60% year-over-year growth in workloads in India. It reflects both the potential of the market and growing awareness of integrated cybersecurity and backup solutions.
How are you staying ahead in this very competitive market?
Katya Ivanova: One believes that traditional backup and standalone security measures are no longer enough. Our approach, from the very beginning, has always been to integrate these functionalities into one single, unified platform. While competitors may have multiple products under a single UI, Acronis truly offers one product with one agent.
This integration ensures coverage of issues like ransomware, which can encrypt backups, or the recovery of maliciously infected files. Our platform includes such services as backup, disaster recovery, antivirus, endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), remote monitoring, file synchronisation, and even data loss prevention (DLP). All this is delivered through one seamless agent, making it efficient and highly secure.
How does Acronis align with global regulatory frameworks, especially NIST standards?
Katya Ivanova: So far, Acronis is the only solution providing an answer to the NIST cybersecurity framework. This has been our vision for the last ten years, striving to meet the highest security standards across regions. Essentially, most regulatory frameworks around the world are mimicking NIST, which makes our platform highly adaptable and compliant.
For example, our solutions make sure that the backups are not only secure but also malware-scanned. This makes the restores clean and safe in nature. The approach makes businesses risk-free even while being in the midst of a probable risk at the time of restoring.
What is the strategy regarding partner growth in India?
Rajesh Chhabra: Currently, we have more than 500 service providers in India, and we are adding more. Our recruitment team is specifically focused on bringing in new partner groups, thereby expanding our reach across the vast geography of India.
We have set up a data centre in India that addresses concerns about data localisation and compliance, particularly for regulated industries, helping sustain this growth. Our approach is not merely to increase numbers but to arm the partners with the tools and resources necessary to deliver value to their customers.
Would you mind explaining why Acronis’s data centre in India is significant?
Rajesh Chhabra: The India data centre is key to ensuring data sovereignty and service performance improvement, as industries like BFSI and healthcare require meeting local regulations, which the data centre enables by keeping data within Indian borders. In addition, local infrastructure decreases latency, securing faster and a more reliable service for Indian customers. This facility follows global standards of Acronis’ security and scalability and is therefore key to its Indian strategy.
What is Acronis doing to protect India from the ever-present ransomware threat?
Rajesh Chhabra: Acronis Anti-Ransomware Defense Acronis fights ransomware with integrated AI-driven solutions in its security suite. It leverages features such as behaviour analysis to identify unusual patterns before alerting users to the identified threats. The company restores files from secure backups, among other things, during an attack. Such comprehensive measures combine data protection with cybersecurity, making it much easier for businesses to safeguard their operations against any interlopers.
What innovations is Acronis bringing to stay ahead of cyber threats?
Rajesh Chhabra: We are embedding AI and machine learning in our solutions, so these technologies can proactively prevent cyber attacks. These will be able to analyse and predict zero-day vulnerabilities in real time and prevent them. We heavily invest in global R&D-from Asia to global—to constantly enhance its offerings. The client gets predictive ability, so they stay ahead of what may potentially threaten them, hence robust data and system protection.
Where do you see the maximum traction in terms of industries?
Rajesh Chhabra: There is rapid adoption across several industries in India. The BFSI sector is one of the fastest adopters, given its stringent regulatory requirements and need for secure data management. Similarly, the healthcare industry relies on Acronis for secure and compliant data storage of sensitive patient information. The IT and services sector, particularly in MSP mode of operation, is also a significant adopter and employs the Acronis platform for delivering cybersecurity and data protection services to customers. Further, SMBs across multiple domains are now finally waking up to the need to protect digital assets and are approaching Acronis for cost-effective and reliable solutions.
What are the focus areas and future plans for the Indian market?
Rajesh Chhabra: India is one of our biggest markets, and we’re looking forward to further strengthening our partner ecosystem with a clear focus on Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities to reach out to even more underserved markets. With rapid digitisation and a strong economy, there’s tremendous scope to innovate and grow further. We will continue investing in local infrastructure, partnerships, and advanced cybersecurity solutions in order to keep pace with the evolving requirements of businesses here.
We also strengthen local support infrastructure and provide training programs to empower partners and customers. And finally, we drive awareness of cybersecurity challenges through educational initiatives and industry collaborations.
Additional goals include offering a complete, seamless solution that not only makes IT more manageable but also protects businesses from day-to-day cyber risks. In the longer term, we will bring in even more mature solutions, strengthen its data centre capabilities, and commit to building local talent and infrastructure to cement its leadership position in the Indian market.
