The Singaporean with a PhD, over 200 patents, and a billion-dollar cyberprotection firm

If it feels like a day can’t go by without reading about a cyberattack in the headlines, you’re not imagining things.

In January 2019, the personal data of 808,000 blood donors in Singapore ended up on the internet – and was left there for nine whole weeks before anybody took notice. Japanese automaker Toyota’s subsidiaries in Thailand and Vietnam, too, were struck by a series of cyberattacks. On March 21, personal information belonging to 3.1 million Toyota clients was also exposed due to a data breach in its sales offices in Japan.

Acronis founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov / Photo credit: Serguei Beloussov

Cybersecurity breaches are not a matter of “if” but “when,” which is why companies like Acronis are stepping up to address the situation.

Founded in 2003, Acronis is a cybersecurity company that specializes in backup, protection, disaster recovery, and enterprise file sync and share solutions. Valued at about US$1 billion, the firm says that it has 500,000 business customers and a revenue of around US$200 million in 2018 – a figure that’s set to grow this year.

At the helm of the entire operation is Serguei Beloussov, Acronis’ Russian-born Singaporean CEO and founder. He’s also the face that greets visitors at the company’s international headquarters in Singapore – literally.

Next to the reception desk is a life-size standee of Beloussov, all decked out in Acronis-branded polo shirt and pants. There is even a Vespa parked nearby, branded and painted in Acronis blue, which used to belong to Beloussov himself. These mild eccentricities may seem out of place at a tech company, but they make sense when one considers the role he has played in the company since day one.

Security wasn’t always the priority when Acronis was founded in the early 2000s. In fact, when the company was spun out of SWSoft, a server automation and virtualization software firm that Beloussov also started, Acronis focused more on physical server management. And that remained the case for the next decade or so.

Then two things happened that prompted Acronis to move into cyberprotection.

The first was the decentralization of computing. “There was a rapid growth of computing outside of large data centers,” Beloussov tells Tech in Asia.

He cites computers, mobile gadgets, and smart sensors as examples of devices that “do not live inside data centers.

And with more computers and servers come an ever-growing amount of data – specifically, data that needs to be protected. Such devices “generate data because they record everything,” he explains. “There are security risks happening to everyone at all points of time. As such, you need to prevent these security threats as much as you can, and you want to recover [as much data] as you can if an attack happens.”

Acronis’ goal evolved into providing an all-in-one package to help companies protect and back up their data both within data centers and on the “edge” of their operations.

However, cyberprotection has been around for about as long as cyberattacks, and Beloussov is more than aware of the competition on multiple fronts. Data protection companies, for example, are gunning after data centers, for example, while security companies are fighting it out on the “edges.” Both markets are battlegrounds for Acronis.

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