Acronis eyes strong partner and cybersecurity growth in Malaysia

The cybersecurity vendor is hoping to double its partners in Malaysia as it looks to achieve 50% growth in the country in 2025.

As one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia, Malaysia continues to see increasing adoption of emerging technologies. Not only has the country become a hub for data centers in the region, but it's also witnessed a strong growth in the manufacturing sector.

Apart from that, the small and medium enterprise (SME) industry in Malaysia is also experiencing rapid growth, contributing a significant amount to the country’s GDP. Yet, despite this, businesses in the country are still having strong concerns about cybersecurity and data protection.

For Acronis, the growth in Malaysia represents a perfect opportunity for them to help businesses in their cybersecurity journey as well. The Swiss cybersecurity vendor has picked Malaysia as a focus region in 2025 as it believes organizations in the country, both large and small, will be needing to improve and enhance their cybersecurity.

According to Katya Ivanova, Chief Sales Officer at Acronis, the vendor has selected Malaysia as a focus region because they believe that Malaysia has a huge potential in terms of digital transformation. In order to achieve this, Acronis is looking to grow its partner network in Malaysia as well.

“Malaysia’s booming economy means there will be more companies emerging. All of these companies need IT, and this is why it also pushes the need for merging IT service providers and traditional value-added resellers to realize that just selling licenses is no longer enough. Businesses really need to provide end-to-end protection,” said Ivanova.

Expecting about 50% growth in their business in Malaysia, Ivanova explained that Acronis currently has more than 100 partners in Malaysia. Yet, they are still focused on growing this figure as it will help them increase their reach to the end customers and to serve more end customers in terms of cyber protection.

“We are working very closely with our distribution in order to help these partners to get the knowledge about Acronis and to start partnering with Acronis. We are helping companies to start providing, not just break and fix where you come and do some ad hoc tasks for the customer, but where you manage the environment on an ongoing basis, and this is all our platform is all about that,” explained Ivanova.

Focus on SMEs

For Ivanova, enterprises are in a better situation when it comes to investing and understanding cybersecurity compared to SMEs. Not only do enterprises have larger budgets, they also have dedicated security teams and even their own SOCs. However, when it comes to SMEs, they may not have this budget and need to rely on the service providers.

“At Acronis, we are attracting MSSPs who have their own SOC. For those that don’t, we want to provide them with it. It's really not just about having an antivirus and hoping everything will be good. We want partners to be able to run XDR and have a team behind this XDR that will be able to respond to the incident and to help them to prevent attack in case they are in an active attack situation,” said Ivanova.

Ivanoa also shared that partners who subscribe for the MSSP program will experience it like an additional revenue because they will have customers and partners that they would not have otherwise.

“We help expand the portfolio for partners that for some reason do not have the security expertise yet or maybe do not plan to have it because they believe that service security is very complicated and complex,” added Ivanova.

Interestingly, Ivanova also pointed out that a lot of SMEs in Malaysia now realize that they don’t have to do everything in-house and are preferring to go and outsource it.

“So obviously, they go to service providers, because these guys will not just say, use solution A or B or C, but they can also manage the solution day-to-day. And when it comes to security, managing the product is actually what brings you the security, not just the fact that you installed something,” said Ivanova.

Ivanova also highlighted that a lot of businesses sometimes invest in very expensive cybersecurity products, whereby they just install it and have no idea on how to manage it.

“They believe that just because they invested so much money into solution, they will never be hacked. But then they obviously get hacked just because the solution is not set up properly, not managed properly,” she said.

Partners in Malaysia

As Acronis looks to growth its partner ecosystem in Malaysia to support more customers, it believes its robust channel program will be enticing for partners, especially since they offer partners MDFs.

“We invest in partners, either expanding their end customer database or driving marketing campaigns. We see that they are often struggling in terms of marketing and sales, because typically if you will look at service providers, they are more technical. For example, an ex-IT person who decided to start the business may not have the sales and marketing experience. The only way they grow the customer database is referrals. But how much can you grow through referrals? This kind of ad hoc type of recommendations. This is where Acronis steps in,” explained Ivanova.

With special enablement programs in marketing, Acronis also helps partners with recommendations on how to run campaigns and such. This includes providing webinars, events and certification education.

“This is the whole topic for Acronis. We have a dedicated academy just for partners. We localize training sessions, and it's not just online training sessions that we provide, but we also organize together with our distributors the boot camps where people come in person. We have special topics, for example, how to protect M365 or how AI impacts the cybersecurity posture of the companies and how to protect these companies from these threats. We educate the market on how to be more vigilant when it comes to the cybersecurity, and obviously that also helps them to adopt Acronis product because in many ways we can help them with these challenges,” she explained.

Apart from that, there also various rebates that are offered to partners. Ivanova pointed out that that if partners reach a certain level, like gold or platinum status, they also have rebates, which they can reinvest into building the team.

As such, Ivanova believes there are three key components that they offer to partners not just in Malaysia but in their ecosystem to ensure they are capable of supporting customer's needs. The first being sufficient operational efficiency in their products. Second, it is the simplicity of managing the products. Thirdly, it's that Acronis will be the partner in their journey.

“We have a lot of different programs, MDF rebates and so on. It's not just technology, but we will really be there for you to grow your business together with you. And if you need us on customer meeting, we will go on a customer meeting with you. If you need us to do demo, we will do demo. And if you need us to help partner to migrate from, for example, competitor to us, we will do it,” concluded Ivanova.