Acronis Cyber Backup begins at $59.67 per year; but even at that price, its latest iteration amply demonstrates the company's maturity and expertise. Acronis has been around for a long time and is well known for its on-site backup solution, but this version also competes well as a business-grade cloud backup product. This version uses its cloud hooks to provide new capabilities to customers, including additional security and remote management features. A free 30-day trial is available, and both Linux and Windows systems are supported, although Mac OS X users are, surprisingly, left out in the cold. Still, overall, Acronis Cyber Backup is a great product, and only comes in slightly behind Editors' Choice winner Arcserve UDP due mainly to a slight dearth of popular backup targets.
Licensing
In previous versions, calculating your license fee could be something of a nightmare as you had to first figure out all of the potential options and their pricing. Customers who had a wide range of needs—such as direct backup support for and email server or a database, such as Microsoft SQL Server, or bare-metal restore capabilities for virtual servers—were usually left scratching their heads until they received assistance from a sales rep. Fortunately, the new licensing structure has been collapsed into a simpler model, although you'll still need a calculator, but at least Acronis has made one available on the website. By focusing solely on the types of systems being backed up rather than features, anybody can figure out what they need and how much it will cost.
There are also two major versions, Standard and Advanced, which differ in several important ways. The Standard version includes most of the core features that businesses would want, including Acronis' ransomware prevention capabilities. The Advanced version goes a step further by adding role-based administrative access, off-site backup management, and a notary feature that uses blockchain technology to prove, without a doubt, that the data stored in your backups isn't affected by ransomware or most other malicious activity.
Getting Started
Installing Acronis Cyber Backup is about as simple as it gets. After downloading the installer, cranking through the setup only takes a few clicks to complete. Once that's done, you're greeted with a new web browser window that asks you to log in. The username and password will be the same as the administrative login used to install the software. The tight integration with Windows authentication makes user management a no-brainer.
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Once logged in, the panel on the left-hand side puts everything within easy reach. Along that same side, a Devices menu lets you pick the networked devices you want to protect. Each device needs to have the Acronis agent installed. After selecting a device, a pop-up window prompts you for a backup destination, schedule, whether or not you want encryption, and if you want the backup converted to a virtual machine (VM) that can be easily launched later.
In addition, any special applications, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) identity store, or an Oracle database can be selected here if the selected network device is hosting one of those platforms. By default, the backup schedule is on weekdays at 11:00 p.m., but this can easily be as frequent as necessary. Acronis does not adopt continuous protection like Carbonite Cloud Backup does, but it does a good job of letting you approximate such a feature by tightening up the schedule since all backups are incremental.
If you elect to convert to a VM, then you will need to add a compatible virtual host to your device list as a target. Currently, Acronis supports Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat Virtualization, and VMWare ESXi. Acronis will deploy a backup agent to the host with only minor prompting for credentials. Because of this, the experience seems almost magical as compared to more cumbersome processes, like the ones I encountered using ADrive Business. After your backup is completed, you will have a working VM. This working VM can be instantly activated if you find yourself without working hardware but need to keep the software chugging until the physical device returns.
Acronis has a wealth of recovery options, too. After you've completed your first backup, you can restore your system completely or just recover a sub-set of the total files. Both processes take just a few clicks and work flawlessly. Alternatively, you have a single button option to launch the latest backup as a VM. In addition, if you have direct access to where your local backups are stored, then the resulting backup files can be mounted and browsed natively under Windows.
One really nice capability is the "Acronis Instant Restore" feature. Acting primarily as a business continuity feature, Acronis Instant Restore lets you launch a machine backed up with Acronis as a VMWare VM, without any data movement, which equates to being able to mount and launch a virtual machine from the backup storage device (cloud or local) without transferring any data to your virtual host. This also applies to any Amazon EC2 instance that's been backed up. It's worth mentioning that this is going to be highly dependent on the speed of your storage medium, so count on needing redundant local backups to make this work the way it was intended.
Security
As a backup app, Acronis Cyber Backup does a good job of resisting attempts to tamper with its internal logic, and by extension, viruses and malware. While someone with unfettered access to a machine could eventually bypass or disable these protections, the Acronis team did not make that easy to do. However, the team didn't stop there as they also added some remarkable ransomware protection.
Ironically, Acronis does this in a way that mimics malware of the past. By hooking into the code your operating system uses to retrieve and store data to your storage devices, it performs real-time analysis of your file system and blocks attempts to maliciously alter or delete your data. By applying a series of heuristics (which in programmer-speak means "best guesses") to determine what counts as "malicious," it can prevent new forms of ransomware from altering or destroying your critical business data. To prove this works, the company touts an example of Acronis Backup successfully blocking WannaCry from infecting any system it protected.
Using Acronis Cyber Backup with Acronis Cloud Storage is even better. Their data centers are fully ISO 27001 compliant, and support Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance in organizations that require it by allowing user-configurable encryption keys. Acronis will also sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to that effect. Data is stored by using industry-standard and military-grade AES-256 bit encryption in hardened data centers, so there is no reason to feel unsafe.
Overall, Acronis Cyber Backup has come a long way in the past few years, and has caught up to its more modern cloud-based competitors, such as Zetta or iDrive (Small Business). I like its ability to back up a variety of both physical and virtual storage devices as well as different cloud services; the anti-ransomware capability is a great addition, too. It's not without drawbacks, however. Using Acronis as a cloud backup tool still requires a minimum of two subscriptions, and there's a lack of third-party cloud storage options at the moment. Also, even though it is cloud-based, it still needs to be hosted by your organization. Because of these complications, it falls short of an Editors' Choice award. But it still sets itself up as a solid competitor among business cloud backup solutions.
Acronis has a lengthy and well-deserved history in both personal and business-grade backup solutions. We found it to be a great choice for both cloud-based backup and anti-ransomware with rapid restore.
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