Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that it has received the Virtualization Product Of The Year award for its next generation backup and data protection product, Acronis Backup & Recovery Virtual Edition, from the Green I.T. Magazine awards in the United Kingdom.

In recognition of Earth Day (April 22), the awards honor products, services and projects that contribute to and promote a more environmentally aware approach to IT practices today. Supported by the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change and iomart hosting, the Green I.T. awards include categories for Recycling Project of the Year, Sustainable Design Product of the Year and IT Operator of the Year, amongst others.

"The adoption of virtualization can bring benefits to businesses of all sizes," commented David Blackman, general manager, North Europe, Middle East and Africa at Acronis. "The fiscal savings from fewer physical servers, using less power and taking up less physical room has direct environmental benefits as well -- less energy consumed, fewer resources used and therefore less impact on the environment. We are proud to have been recognized as a leader in this growing market."

Acronis Backup & Recovery can help businesses to accelerate their adoption of virtualization by providing integrated data migration tools with innovative, fast backup and recovery technology. Acronis supports all major hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Parallels. Critical data can be quickly recovered from and migrated between a virtual, physical and cloud environments from one easy to use solution.

The winners of the Green I.T. Awards 2012 are highlighted at www.greenitawards.com . Green I.T. is published by Barrow & Thompkins Connexion Ltd in the UK, whose publications also include Storage Magazine, Network Computing and Computing Security.