Acronis’ only Canadian data centre until now has been in Vancouver, and in a business where physical proximity to the data centre impacts efficiency, they expect having one in Toronto will boost their Canadian business.
Pat Hurley, Vice President and General Manager, Americas at Acronis
Today, cyberprotection vendor Acronis is formally announcing the availability of their second Cyber Cloud data centre in Canada. It becomes the second such data centre in Canada, with Acronis having set up their first in Vancouver in October 2020.
Acronis was a relative latecomer into the Canadian market with their Cyber Cloud Centres – they have more than 50 globally.
“We wanted to make sure we had built solid plans and met solid requirements,” said Pat Hurley, Vice President and General Manager, Americas at Acronis. “The second reason is related to demand. We have been doing business in Canada for 17-18 years, but only 4-5 years ago did we make decision to establish these Cyber Cloud data centres. At that time, most of our existing business in Canada was in the SMB, where there was less concern about data sovereignty.”
Before the Vancouver data centre was established in October 2020, Acronis customers could still get all the Acronis solutions, but only through a US-based data centre.
“The management components were all hosted in the U.S. data centre and the U.S. was the only option from a storage target perspective,” Hurley noted. “The target from Toronto can now be to multiple sites, either Vancouver or a Google centre in Montreal. When we didn’t have a Canadian data centre, we worked with partners who had Canadian backup.”
The decision to establish Acronis’ first Cyber Cloud data centre in Vancouver – a significant market but a much smaller one than the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] – in a market where distance is critical to speed and efficiency, came from local partnering factors.
“The decision to go to Vancouver first was very much a ‘friend of the family’ issue,” Hurley said. “We had a local partner who we were friendly with – Parallels – which had a very large presence in the Seattle area. The Toronto centre was expected to follow soon after, but it was delayed by COVID.”
Now that the Toronto Cyber Cloud Center is live, Acronis is expecting a surge in business.
“With the new infrastructure in Toronto, we expect customers will be more proactive, with existing customers who are based in or near there moving their business there, and new ones setting up in Toronto. The faster speeds they will be able to get by closer proximity to the centres are important.”
For Canadian customers closer to Toronto than to Vancouver, Hurley said that the news is a big deal.
“They can feel and know their data is protected and they know where it is,” he stated. “The cloud can be a mysterious entity but telling them where the data is, and having a place that they can physically see is important.” That applies even in cases like this where the centre is not actually a separate brick and mortar facility, and is space in a colo hotel.
“There will definitely be an incremental boost for partner business,” Hurley added. “A lot of our Go-to-Market starts at the distribution level. We do business with Ingram, TDSYNNEX, ITcloud.ca and Pax8.
“This will also help us recruit new partners into the fold, and help us where we were cut off from certain service sets within a service provider, particularly government and university,” Hurley added. “The improved connectivity between the data centres resulting from this will also assist partners who have data centres across the globe.”
Hurley also noted that Acronis’ sports sponsorship-focused program, TeamUP, currently does not have a service provider partner in Canada.
“With TeamUp, we work with sports organizations and what we call CyberFit partners, who are service providers,” he said. “We don’t have any of those yet in Canada, although we have been trying hard to get one.”
