As technology evolves, so does the myriad of cyberthreats. To address the range of enterprise protection needs, cybersecurity company Acronis International GmbH placed its bets on an integrated solution that encompasses safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity and security, which it calls SAPAS: The Five Vectors of Cyber Protection.

Founded in 2003 and achieving unicorn or billion-dollar valuation status this year, Acronis has moved from a data protection company to a specialized cyberprotection platform, according to Serguei Beloussov, chairman and chief executive officer of Acronis.

“I think we look at this holistically,” Beloussov said. “All of these vectors are a problem. All of this together is important for the fact that your IT infrastructure is functional, and at all times controlled by you.”

Beloussov spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Acronis Global Cyber Summit event in Miami Beach, Florida. They discussed the company’s differentiated approach to cyber protection and its newly launched toolkit for third-party developers (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Threats beyond the bad guys

Security threats come not only from bad guys, but also employees, partners or customers who should not have access to third-party information. “If you want to break something, you better break it based on your decision, and you better be able to roll back,” Beloussov said. “And so, it comes from data protection, but it goes to security, and privacy, and authenticity.”

It is the integration of all these aspects that differentiates cyber protection from “old” data protection. “The difference is that it’s designed to work in the world which is inherently insecure,” Beloussov pointed out. “So, if you have a cyber protection application, a cyber protection hardware, it has to be protected itself.”

Acronis’ strategy seeks to safeguard all kinds of data in any environment, including public and private clouds, mobile devices at the edge of computing networks, movable workloads and other virtualized applications.

“It means that you don’t lose anything. Everything is accessible all the time, but the right people have access and you can control the access,” Beloussov explained. “Nothing is modified in such ways that you don’t know it was modified, and no bad guys can break into your IT.”

To meet the challenge of integrating across so many systems and workloads, Acronis has released a set of application programming interfaces to spur third-party development atop its cyber protection platform. Acronis claims more than 6,000 in its partner network and upwards of five exabytes of data under its management. The company is positioning its partner network for product distribution in hopes of establishing a reseller network that generates revenue for participating application makers.

“Ultimately for developers it’s about doing something which makes money, and doing something which makes sense. With our partner network, our workload and data reach, they get to make sense and they get to make money,” Beloussov said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Acronis Global Cyber Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit. Neither Acronis, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE