Acronis Cyber Protect

What Acronis Cyber Protect actually is

Acronis Cyber Protect is backup software with endpoint security bolted into the same agent and console: image and file backup for physical machines, virtual machines, and cloud workloads, plus anti-malware, EDR, patch management, vulnerability assessment, URL filtering, and data loss prevention depending on the tier. It is the flagship of Acronis International GmbH — a company founded in Singapore in 2003, incorporated in Switzerland in 2008, with its corporate headquarters in Schaffhausen and an international headquarters back in Singapore. Acronis reports that more than 21,000 service providers use its platform to protect over 750,000 businesses in 150 countries; those are vendor figures, but the installed base in the MSP channel is not in dispute.

In our backup solutions category, Acronis is the consolidation play. The pitch is that one product replaces a backup tool plus an endpoint security suite plus a patch manager, managed from one console with one agent on each machine. That integration is real: backups can be scanned for malware before restore, security policies and backup schedules live in the same place, and the forensic backup option (Advanced tier) preserves memory dumps and related artifacts for incident response. Whether consolidation is what you want is a question we return to below.

Coverage is broad: Windows and Linux servers, workstations, VMware and Hyper-V hosts, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace seats, NAS devices, and mobile devices, with storage in Acronis-hosted cloud, your own infrastructure, or third-party object storage. The companion service-provider product (Cyber Protect Cloud) adds multi-tenancy and billing integration for MSPs.

Pricing: what you really pay

Acronis pricing is where honest reviewing gets laborious, because the company sells through several models at once. On the service-provider side, the published pay-as-you-go list runs per-workload: 31.20 per server, 8.84 per virtual machine, 4.42 per workstation, 2.60 per Microsoft 365 seat (currency units per month as listed), with Acronis Hosted Storage at 0.052 per GB and partner or customer storage unlimited within the workload price. The alternative per-GB model flips it: unlimited workloads, storage billed at 0.140 per GB (Acronis-hosted), 0.088 (partner storage), or 0.078 (customer storage).

For direct business subscriptions, Acronis's own comparison page lists starting prices of $85.00, $109.00, and $129.00 per device per year across its business tiers, with per-device annual MSRP for Cyber Protect Standard at about $85 per workstation, Backup Advanced at $109, and Cyber Protect Advanced at $129. Server licensing is the number that catches people out: independent pricing reviews put Standard Server protection at $595 per server per year and Advanced Server at $925. On the consumer side (True Image-branded home plans) the comparison page shows $49.99, $72.99, and $124.99 per year for up to five computers, and aggregator listings show the same range as roughly $4.17 to $10.42 per month.

The practical lesson from the field is that the pricing model you pick matters more than the tier. One documented case cut a €350-per-month quote to under €100 by switching from per-GB to per-workload licensing; the rule of thumb is per-workload for few machines holding a lot of data, per-GB for many machines holding little. Server counts dominate the bill in both models, and storage is frequently a separate line. Our advice: model your exact workload mix on both axes before talking to a reseller, and treat any quote as negotiable — discounts through channel partners vary widely.

Performance & infrastructure

There are no Acronis servers to benchmark in the way we test VPS hosts on our benchmarks page; what matters here is backup throughput, restore reliability, and where your data physically lands. On the last point Acronis is strong. A partner briefing describes a choice of 26 data centers worldwide for Acronis-hosted storage — Acronis-operated plus Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure regions — with explicit Asia-Pacific presence (Singapore, Japan, Australia) alongside Europe and the Americas. The count has almost certainly grown since that briefing, so we treat 26 as a floor rather than a current inventory.

The bring-your-own-storage story is one of the widest in the category. Acronis's Backup Gateway documentation lists Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Wasabi, OpenStack Swift, and "other solutions using S3", plus on-premises S3-compatible object storage, NFS shares, and its own erasure-coded storage clusters. For compliance-heavy buyers, that means you can keep backup data in a jurisdiction of your choosing instead of relying on the vendor's footprint.

On the product side, the engine does image-based and file-level backups with incremental chains, deduplication on the advanced tiers, retention scheduling, and staged backup schemes. The security half is behavioral anti-malware with ransomware interception, patch management, and vulnerability assessments — with Advanced tiers adding EDR and DLP. We have not run restore-time tests on Acronis, so we make no throughput claims; what we can say is that the architecture (image backups plus a pre-restore scan) is the one we prefer for ransomware scenarios, because a backup is only as good as its clean restore.

One operational habit we recommend with any agent-based backup: schedule test restores, not just backup jobs. A green backup dashboard measures copying, not recovery. Acronis makes verification possible through its recovery media and staged restore options, but nothing forces you to use them, and the reports we trust least in this category are the ones where nobody has restored anything in a year.

Where it falls short

The pricing and licensing structure is the product's worst feature. Per-workload versus per-GB, per-device versus per-seat, workstations versus servers, hosted versus bring-your-own storage, edition tiers, reseller discounts — the number of variables is high enough that two similar deployments can pay wildly different amounts. Two similar estates can also land on different resellers with different discounting, which makes price-shopping part of the job. The bundled agent is the second complaint, and it is a long-standing one: running backup plus behavioral anti-malware plus patching on one endpoint costs CPU and memory, and constrained machines feel it.

Feature sprawl cuts both ways. If you want backup only, you are paying for and configuring a security platform you may not use; if you already have an EDR you like, the integration argument weakens and the backup-only competitors in our backup solutions category become more attractive. The console is capable but has the learning curve of a product that does five jobs.

Finally, marketing figures deserve discounting. "50+ cloud storage destinations" and business counts come from Acronis's own materials; the concrete, verifiable claims are the ones in the documentation — the storage list above, the pricing pages, and the product comparison chart. Support and SLA terms differ between the direct business products and the service-provider platform, so read the agreement for your specific channel rather than assuming one standard.

Who should pick this

We would pick Acronis Cyber Protect when the job is genuinely two jobs: backup and endpoint protection for a mixed estate of Windows/Linux servers, virtual machines, and Microsoft 365 data, with requirements about where backup data lives. It is our pick for IT teams and MSPs that value one console and one agent over best-of-breed parts, and for environments where ransomware recovery (pre-restore scanning, forensic backups) is a core requirement.

We would skip it for backup-only needs at small scale — simpler, cheaper tools exist — and for teams that already run a dedicated EDR and want their backup tool to stay out of the security business. Budget the server licensing first; if your estate is server-heavy, compute both pricing models before you fall in love with the feature list.

Key takeaways

• Backup plus endpoint security (anti-malware, EDR on Advanced, patch management, DLP) in one agent and console, from Acronis International GmbH (founded 2003 in Singapore, Swiss-incorporated since 2008, HQ Schaffhausen).
• Two pricing models: per-workload (from 4.42/workstation and 31.20/server per month on the service-provider list) or per-GB (from 0.078/GB on customer storage) — picking the right one can change the bill by 3x or more.
• Direct subscriptions start near $85/device/year for Cyber Protect Standard; server licensing jumps to about $595–$925/server/year.
• Storage choice is a strength: 26+ data centers (Acronis, Google Cloud, Azure) plus S3, Wasabi, Swift, NFS, and on-prem S3-compatible destinations via Backup Gateway.
• Image-based backups with incremental chains, deduplication, and pre-restore malware scanning suit ransomware recovery planning.
• Watch the agent's resource footprint and the licensing matrix; backup-only buyers pay for security features they may not want.

Sources

• https://acronis.com/en-us/products/cloud/cyber-protect/pricing-payg
• https://acronis.com/en/products/compare-products
• https://costbench.com/software/backup-recovery/acronis
• https://valydex.com/reviews/acronis-cyber-protect-review
• https://support.atera.com/hc/en-us/articles/7669897040284-Acronis-Cyber-Protect-per-workload-and-per-GB-models
• https://www.acronis.com/en/pr/2018/acronis-celebrates-15-years-of-cyber-protection-in-expanded-corporate-hq-in-switzerland
• https://www.acronis.com/en/pr/2017/acronis-celebrates-three-years-of-returning-the-international-hq-to-singapore-and-the-global-success-of-newly-released-products
• https://assets.cloud.im/prod/Content/docs/Acronis-Cyber-Protect-Cloud-EN.pdf
• https://download.acronis.com/software-defined/pdf/AcronisCyberInfrastructure_7_3_abgw_quick_start_guide_en-US.pdf