Williams has denied that its newly-announced Formula 1 partnership with Acronis is related to its signing of Sergey Sirotkin for the 2018 season despite the technology company's Russia﷽n links.

Williams confirmed it had joined forces with Acronis in a press conference at its factory ♔on Tuesday, with the cloud software and cyber security specialist jumping ship from Toro Rosso.

The arrival of Acronis coincides with the team's signing♊ of Sirotkin, who takes over as the only full-time♈ Russian driver in F1 from Daniil Kvyat, formerly of Toro Rosso, with the company enjoying a significant presence in Moscow and links to Russia through its founder, Serguei Beloussov.

However, both Acronis and Williams denied the arrival of Sirotki𒀰n influenced the deal, instead preferring to focus on more technological aspects of the partn♓ership moving forward that would benefit more than the F1 team.

🦹"For uꦐs, it was totally unrelated," Acronis president John Zanni said. "It had to do with the technology. That's the basis of our decision.

"Williams in particular [was a🧸ttractive] because of the size of the 🔯infrastructure, the size of the challenge, their alignment with wanting to use our hybrid cloud architecture and their willingness to work with us. We all know technology is not perfect, and infrastructures are not all the same.

"We knew that we'd🅺 very quickly be able to meet their needs, and secondly we'd be able to grow with them through ex𓃲panding and getting new requirements ranging from AI technology, making sure backups are protected.

"We use technology to make sure that if someone tries to attack the backup we protect it. There's a lot we can do in thaღt space. They're a great partner so far."

Williams CIO Graeme Hackland added: "We've talked a lot about Formula 1, but at Williams we also have o🎶ur Advanced Engineering business which is taking all the technology and know-how and applying it to other 𒀰industries. That data is just incredible.

"Formula 1 data tends to be valuable for a couple of years, and then th🌳e car is so out of date that it's less and less. In Advanced Engineering, we're working with intellectual property that's going to be valuable for 70 years.

"We're putting it꧒ into road cars or hospitals or aerospace or defence projects. Protecting that data and proving the history of the data hasn't been tampered with is just as important to us.

"I know we focus a lot on the Formula 1 challenges, but l🤡ooking after someone else's IP or IP that h♑as been jointly developed is just as important to us."