You read that right. After what felt like a very long job search (to be fair it only felt that way because it was, in fact, very long), I no longer need to use the #HireDaveNow hashtag. This frees me up to focus on other Dave-related hashtags, like the very timely #WriteInDave2020, the crowd favorite #ThanksDave (which I’ve only learned just now some people are using in a very serious fashion), and the one that started the Dave-related hashtag phenomenon, #LetDaveDrive.
By the time you’re reading this, I will have already started my new job as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Acronis. I’ll be way over at the technical end of the marketing spectrum, helping folks understand how Acronis solutions work and helping people understand the business value of technical features.
As part of my interview process, I provided URLs to what I consider to be my best works reachable on the public web. Not only did the folks read the examples I sent, they also read through pretty much everything I’d written that they could find. Admittedly, since I had pointed them to a few posts on this site, they didn’t need to go on a difficult search. They also called my references starting maybe 10 or 15 minutes after I sent their contact info.
Since all job interviews really should be two-way, I did at least as much investigation into Acronis as they did into me.
Most of the folks who are familiar with Acronis likely think of them as a developer of backup software for personal use and use by small or medium businesses, but they’ve got a lot more than that going on.
Back in the day, when the term “data protection” was first being used (prior to that we just called it “backup”, or — for the advanced folks in the crowd — “backup and recovery”), most people hearing the term for the first time thought it was security-related. Of course, data protection (whose meaning quickly expanded to include keeping a copy of data off-site) only protects data against accidental and unintentional loss. Typical data protection solutions do nothing to prevent unauthorized people from copying or intentionally destroying the data. So, over time, we all learned that “protection” and “security” were two completely different things.
Acronis believes that security should be built into data protection. Since the term data protection was already used for non-secure solutions, Acronis moved into the cyber protection marketspace. As a part of beefing up their data protection solutions to be cyber protection solutions, they improved upon it a lot, expanding its ability to scale, and now Acronis cyber protection solutions are also a good fit for large enterprises.
However, (here’s where things get exciting for me), there’s a whole bunch more to Acronis than cyber protection. Other solutions they offer include:
- Scalable software-defined infrastructure (SDI)
- Hybrid cloud solutions
- Use of blockchain to ensure the authenticity of documents while providing non-repudiation
- Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to security, data classification, and automating operations
- All products have APIs, and some even have software developer kits (SDKs)
So, yeah, I’m excited about getting my hands on and digging into all this stuff.
If you’re curious about any of the solutions mentioned above, don’t worry — I expect to be talking and writing about them a lot in the very near future.
Thanks and Appreciation
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much of my job search really felt like a group effort. To all the folks out there who helped me out along the way, thank you so much. It could have been being a reference, or arranging an introduction. It might have been forwarding a job posting to me, or suggesting a company or direction I hadn’t looked at yet. It might have been giving me much-needed encouragement when things were looking dark.
Whatever it was, know that I appreciate your efforts (regardless of whether or not they panned out), both professionally and personally, more than I know how to put into words. Thank you.
Congratulations Dave. Perfect job for you.