Cloud data management and security services vendor Acronis has announced it is rapidly ramping up its data centre footprint.

To better serve the 20,000 service providers globally that deliver its backup and data protection products, the firm plans to open many more data centres around the world to bring services closer to to those providers.

It said this will reduce latency and satisfy the growing demands for data sovereignty in the countries providers operate in.

While confirming the company had no interest in building these facilities itself, Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller said the firm would continue to use a mix of hyperscalers (including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure), international data centre services companies and national colocation providers, to open up the new data centre spaces.

The company already has 21 data centres in Europe, and 38 in total. Of this total, 14 have been opened in the last 12 months.

In 2022, the plan is to scale this up to “over 100”, with a significant number of the new openings taking place in the US, as part of the company’s edge-focused “globally local” strategy.

The strategy was promoted at the company’s #CyberFit Summit, which took place at its headquarters in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, last week.

In addition to increasing its data centre footprint, Pulvermueller said the channel-focused firm would be doing more to help service providers go after increasing business in public cloud data protection. It would also introduce integrated support for many more niche and specialist data workloads, and help providers chase greater levels of enterprise-scale business.

Currently, 80% of the vendor’s global sales are generated in the SMB (small- to medium-sized business) market.