Williams is one of the world's leading Formula 1 teams. It exists purely to race in the top echelon of motor racing, where it has been winning Grands Prix for more than three decades. The Williams name has been synonymous with top-level motorsport since the 1960s.

After running teams on the sport's nursery slopes, team patron Frank Williams founded Frank Williams Racing Cars in 1966 and entered F1 in 1969 with his friend Piers Courage behind the wheel. Frank quickly earned a reputation as one of the industry's more determined individuals and, after selling his controlling interest in his original team, he established Williams Grand Prix Engineering with British engineer Patrick Head in 1977. They built their first car, the FW06, the following year and the team immediately went from strength to strength.

Williams has since won 16 FIA Formula One World Championship titles, nine for constructors and seven for drivers, and is the third most successful team on the grid.

A few years ago, Williams entered into a technology partnership with Acronis to provide cyber protection for its infrastructure. By leveraging Acronis Cyber Backup, Williams was able to reduce the time required to perform backups from days to minutes. The IT department has taken advantage of these productivity gains by implementing service level agreements across the company for responding and resolving all tickets.

EXPANDED ROLLOUT
As noted above, Williams has been using Acronis Cyber Backup to protect its data. The solution is installed on roughly 300 servers and 1,500 endpoints and is protecting nearly half a petabyte of data. The racing company recently began taking advantage of the Microsoft 365 backup capabilities native in the product, and it is now also protecting over 1,200 mailboxes and SharePoint sites - representing about 15 TB of data in total - for both the Formula One division and Williams Advanced Engineering.

INTEGRATED BACKUP AND CYBERSECURITY
Williams has also been an early adopter of Acronis Cyber Protect, a unique new Al-enhanced solution that integrates data protection with cybersecurity. Enriched with next-generation, full-stack anti-malware protection and comprehensive yet simple endpoint management tools, Acronis Cyber Protect simplifies daily operations and reporting, all while combating advanced cyberattacks with new use cases enabled by integration. Since all these capabilities are delivered and managed through a single solution, it eliminates the increased complexity and cost caused by relying on multiple vendor solutions, saving on licensing, deployments, testing, and training.

According to Williams CIO Graeme Hackland, Acronis Cyber Protect is currently installed on a dozen endpoints, and "This could ultimately scale to our entire infrastructure footprint of 600 servers and 1,500 endpoints."

This is because a number of innovative features found in the single, integrated agent have caught Hackland's attention. He explains: "We used to use Microsoft patch management, but there is a long lag when rolling patches out, whereas Acronis gives us a much faster deployment cycle." He continues, "we are really impressed by the continuous data protection. We've flagged our most commonly used internal applications and really like this feature." Graeme also sees the benefits of having a single product that offers URL filtering and vulnerability assessments as well, and he notes that "Ultimately we've added several new layers of cyber protection as a result."

New-found protection has come to the additional remote workers and workloads that have resulted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Graeme, "We already had a very remote workforce, but no matter where our staff are working, Acronis is protecting us." He continues, "We have given all of our users the confidence to work from home and to create sensitive data remotely. Before Acronis, the burden of responsibility on backup would have been on the staff, but now this function is centralised and scheduled for them."

More info: www.acronis.com