Acronis Cyber Protect is great for any small/mid-sized business. The price point makes it attractive to all budgets >$100/year for 5 device deployments. Competitors offer less and charge more! Very happy with the suite of products, and renewals are simple and straightforward as well. I hope they don't change a thing!
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite is well suited to standard images of company approved software and standard configurations for all users. When every user has the same computer configuration, it is easily managed with a standard image across the board. It is less effective if you need to have multiple configurations for different groups. It becomes cumbersome to manage all the various images. When you add to the complexity by having to address the different drivers for the different hardware model computers, this only adds to the overall number of images you will have to manage, create and keep updated. I find Ghost most helpful with standard hardware model computers and one or two images company wide.
Some features have actually become more complicated over the years. One that comes to mind is creating a backup plan that can execute daily to an external USB media that is changed daily (older versions would back up to the, for example, "F" drive regardless of which drive was attached - newer versions identify each drive uniquely, and a backup task created with a given external drive will fail due to the lack of media presence if the drive is replaced).
Error messages could be less cryptic.
Support turnaround time and live assistance could be faster.
Protect my system from data loss and also can manage multiple devices via online cloud from any where and also can set Multifactor authentication for more secure login access. Archive any backup which will use less space and we can transfer it to any other space also so it is very easy as server admin to manage acronics utilities
Beyond a single instance, I haven't had to approach Acronis' support. I needed a new key following the death of my previous workstation, and they rapidly supplied it. I've heard from colleagues that they've quickly answered any questions that've been asked. If I need something, I'll generally frequent FAQ pages first, although Acronis actually has instructional videos to help users get started, which is forward-thinking. Great software that fills a vital niche for Windows systems.
IDrive is incredibly faster than Acronis on cloud backup. After Acronis' failures on cloud storage I moved to IDrive for peace of mind. IDrive can also do local backups, and either variant of system state, server, outlook, exchange, etc. It does not however have the ability to do a full image of a bitlocked machine like Acronis, so I'm continuing the local imaging with Acronis.
The Windows version is generally reliable and only ran into one issue thus far. Restores are easy and there are many features. On MacOS, it's a completely different story. There is significant resource leakage related to the updater app that can bog down part of a CPU core continuously until it is disabled. The mobile backup feature also needs to be disabled via UNIX command line or CPU usage will go up when a mobile device on the same network like an iPad or iPhone's screen is turned on.
A positive impact of Ghost would be time. To deploy computers form scratch is very time consuming and labor intensive for the IT Department. Ghost clearly saves the time of the IT departments staff to quickly get a new computer out to user so they can spend their time on addressing other issues and being more productive.
Time is money. If the IT department is spending hours preparing computers and employees are out of a computer for an extended period of time waiting for one to be loaded, this is money lost to the company in paying employees to sit around and wait for a computer to be configured.
