To give its customers what they want — business continuity — Microsoft has acquired InMage, a provider of cloud-based disaster and recovery technology.
On its official blog, Microsoft said business continuity — the ability to backup, replicate and quickly recover data and applications in case of a system failure — is an important consideration for businesses.
“After all, revenue, supply chains, customer loyalty, employee productivity and more are on the line,” the company said in its post Friday. “It’s also very complicated and expensive to do. CIOs consistently rank business continuity as a top priority, but often don’t have the budgets or time to do it right.”
Solving the Challenge
Microsoft said it was committed to solving this challenge for its customers, and its acquisition of InMage was a step toward that goal. Bringing InMage under the Microsoft umbrella will enable Redmond to accelerate its strategy to provide hybrid cloud business continuity products and services for any IT environment, including Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The buy will help make Microsoft’s Azure cloud the “ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world,” and provide an onramp for VMware customers looking to permanently migrate their applications to the cloud, the company said.
Integrating the Tech
Now that the acquisition had been completed, Microsoft is working to integrate InMage’s Scout technology into its Azure Site Recovery service to give customers a “simple, cost-effective way to ensure business continuity with the power and scale of the Azure global cloud.”
The company has already said it plans to enable data migration to Azure with Scout. Current customers can continue to use the InMage products and services. In the future, customers will acquire Scout through Azure Site Recovery. Additionally, Microsoft said it will continue to work with InMage’s existing service provider partners, as well as new partners, to offer the companies’ mutual customers a variety of products and services.
Connecting Customers, Partners, Microsoft Clouds
Laura DuBois, research vice president for IDC, said the acquisition was “a great move to meet important customer needs with the cloud as a target for disaster recovery,” in a poorly understood and underserved market.
Enterprise customers are looking for the best, most valuable ways to take advantage of the cloud, and business continuity is often a great place to start, said Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft, in the blog post.
That’s why the company is “very focused on delivering strong solutions in this area for our customers,” Numoto said. “It is a key element of our continued effort to deliver a consistent hybrid platform and a broad range of services that connect customer, partner and Microsoft clouds.”
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