Arcserve Southern Africa has revealed that the global alliance between Arcserve and Sophos holds great significance for the South African market.

“Through this collaboration, organisations can now employ the only market solution that integrates anti-ransomware and other threat prevention technologies, such as deep learning AI for both known and unknown malware, and award-winning disaster recovery and high availability capabilities for prevention against data loss,” says Byron Horn-Botha, lead: Arcserve Southern Africa Channel and Partnerships. “Together, the new solution delivers a multi-layered approach to prevent, protect, and immunise backup data from cyber-attacks.”

A report issued by Cybersecurity Ventures predicts the global cost of ransomware will reach $6-trillion by 2021, with an attack on businesses every 14 seconds by the end of this year.

“With cybercriminals continuously taking advantage of enterprises to turn profits, this alliance will provide businesses with a two-pronged approach to cyber-readiness and IT resilience. By combining both cybersecurity and data protection capabilities into a single offering, companies will have a comprehensive solution that fully covers all their infrastructure needs,” Horn-Botha adds.

The joint solution will be delivered via Arcserve’s award-winning Appliance Series, the only turnkey self-contained appliances for disaster recovery and application availability. Powered by Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), the Arcserve Appliance Series combines flash-accelerated deduplicated storage, robust server processing, and high-speed networking with highly redundant hardware and cloud services.

“Increasingly, cybercriminals are targeting backup systems as a way to increase the odds that compromised businesses will make a ransom payment. Having dedicated protection from both malware and the latest exploits ensures the backup data will stand strong against the most advanced threats,” says Francois Depayras, Sophos’ vice-president of OEM sales and alliances.

“Sophos Intercept X for Server provides anti-ransomware, anti-exploit and deep learning technology to provide the highest level of protection. This makes the Arcserve Appliance the most secure solution available in the market.”

Oussama El-Hilali, chief technology officer of Arcserve, says that too many organisations are being forced to have the ‘how do we pay ransom’ conversation.

“We saw a market gap that needed to be filled, and Sophos was the natural fit. We know data protection and they know cybersecurity. As threats become more difficult to combat, this alliance is transformative in the industry, taking our cyber protection to the next level and providing partners with the opportunity to educate customers on the unique benefits of an integrated, two-pronged defence against cybercrime.”

Arcserve Appliances integrate Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Server, award-winning endpoint protection with artificial intelligence, delivering a comprehensive protect-in-depth approach to accelerate data, system and application resiliency.