A data race that is protected by Acronis

After 15 years in business, Acronis is celebrating its rich history at the corporate headquarters in Switzerland this week. Among the invited guests are members of the Renault e.dams Formula E team, who are in town for the Formula E Zürich ePrix this weekend. At the gala, they’ll be sharing what it takes to compete in a data-driven sport.

Half-way across the world, Acronis is holding another event with a Formula 1 team. Lance Stroll, a local Formula 1 star from Williams Martini Racing, will be sharing his experience of using data to prepare for the Canadian Grand Prix. This weekend, the country’s eyes will be on Stroll and his every move – moves that will be based on studying data.

In the words of the four-time Formula 1 World Champion, Alain Prost, “Data is one of the most important things in our lives and in racing. Every year, data is increasing and becoming more important.”

Dealing with data

With more than 300 telemetry sensors on every car, Formula 1 teams deal with a lot of data during racing weekends. This data is collected, combined, stored, and processed, helping teams to make actionable decisions during the race. The same data is transmitted back to the factory for further analysis and use in car designs.

Even before the current season ends, teams begin working on the next season’s car using the data collected during the current and previous seasons to drive the design decisions.

This puts an enormous pressure on the teams’ IT pros to make all data from any point in time available to engineers in a natural way. Legacy backup solutions can put a strain on the available resources if it takes too long to restore the needed file or recover from a ransomware attack that encrypted backup. When it happens, they come to Acronis.

Unbeatable cyber protection

Acronis’ cyber protection products are uniquely suited for process automation and many other workloads used in the manufacturing and automotive industries. Over the years, these verticals accounted for more than 30 percent of Acronis’ new business. This led Acronis to ‘add fuel to the fire’ – investing more and making the technology easily available to motorsport teams. We didn’t have to wait long for the result. Acronis’ presence in motorsports continues to grow, as witnessed by the many partnerships we’ve established in this field.

To meet the demands of the current market, Acronis completely transitioned to a hybrid cloud architecture. The company re-invented itself, giving clients an easy way to back up, protect and store all of their data with a single innovative solution. Acronis went a step further, adding AI-based ransomware protection its solutions to keep the hands of criminals off the backups. The company then went even further by introducing Acronis Notary, which lets users certify data and verify its integrity through blockchain technology. Acronis now delivers complete cyber protection, which frees up resources and helps teams with their own digital transformation.

Digital transformation is something that many motorsport teams, even in Formula 1, are going through today. Many of them want to eradicate tape and make data restoration from any point in time easy. One particular team told Acronis that they have three safes full of tapes and, because it takes so long to restore data, the person requesting it cannot wait and often moves on to a different job. With Acronis, they solved this issue. Acronis’ cyber protection solutions helped the team to reduce the backup time from more than a day to just a few hours. Now any file from any point in time can be restored within minutes, if not seconds. Acronis also allowed the team to be more aggressive with cloud adoption, knowing that the data is safe and protected from ransomware attacks.

“Acronis has become part of our world in Formula E and Formula 1. Acronis is a strong company — something that’s very important because we need to be certain that our data will be safe in the future,” concluded Alain Prost.

Leading Formula 1 and Formula E teams use Acronis cyber protection. What about you?

Top image: Lance Stroll of Williams Martini Racing on the grid with an engineer. © Glenn Dunbar/Williams F1.