Actifio Lets Customers Move Faster To Microsoft Azure

Actifio, the copy data virtualization company, today announced support of Microsoft Azure with the availability of the Actifio Sky in the Azure Marketplace. Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform helps enterprise customers move faster to the cloud, speeding up hybrid cloud adoption for test data provisioning for application development, backup, disaster recovery, instant recovery, data migration, long-term retention or analytics.

IT leaders are driving initiatives to accelerate business innovation and speed to market via faster software development while driving down costs. Actifio helps enterprise CIOs reduce risk while moving faster to a hybrid cloud, with a data management platform that:

• Provides a cloud on-ramp that can start with low-risk use cases, such as vaulting backups to the cloud, bursting and shifting application testing and development to the cloud, and testing instant recovery in the cloud;
• Satisfies development, test, and line-of-business teams with accelerated software releases, driven by improved Test Data Management with instant, secure, self-serve access to virtual data in Azure using Actifio Sky;
• Empowers cloud-focused continuous integration (CI) and delivery (CD) processes to build, deploy and deliver higher quality applications faster which speed new capabilities to market;
• Protects critical applications such as large databases, with instant recovery on-premises or in the cloud and point-in-time rollbacks, regardless of location; 
• Applies SLA-based data lifecycle policies that can be managed easily across clouds and sites globally; and
• Supports on-premises deployments, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Softlayer, Oracle Cloud, and over 50 MSP clouds.

The Actifio data virtualization platform is designed to help enterprises leverage Azure for their mission-critical applications, such as application test and development with SQL Server, for vaulting backups, as well as for disaster recovery, all in a safe, incremental approach. In addition to the launch of Actifio Sky in the Azure Marketplace, Actifio OnVault will also support Azure Blob storage as an object storage target for vaulting data, for long-term retention. Beyond low-cost retention, Actifio OnVault allows enterprises to access data in cloud vaults instantly for business intelligence, analytics, compliance and data warehousing operations to unlock business value, using on-demand cloud infrastructure.

"Enabling a dynamic hybrid cloud architecture can be a real challenge for administrators," said Steven Hill – senior storage analyst with 451 Research. "Public cloud resources like Microsoft Azure offer a rich set of off-premises options for businesses of every size, but a major key to effectively integrating the public cloud lies in establishing a policy-based data management framework like Actifio that allows a customer to effectively administrate data resources regardless of where they reside."

"Microsoft Azure is the trusted cloud destination for enterprises and governments, in no small part because of Microsoft’s deep understanding of the requirements of their mission critical-applications," said Tad Brockway, General Manager, Azure Storage. "As enterprises move to the cloud, we see hybrid as their primary strategy and of course their key applications and databases demand special attention. The Actifio data virtualization platform with Actifio Sky^TM in the Azure Marketplace extends hybrid cloud capabilities to help enterprises leverage Azure for their most important applications."

One of several early adopters of the combined technologies is Maryland Courts, the judiciary branch of the state government. In addition to using Actifio for backup and DR of Oracle and SQL Server databases, and VMs, Maryland Courts is now vaulting critical data to Actifio Sky in Microsoft Azure for out-of-region compliance requirements.

"The move to cloud is a fundamental shift that allows IT leaders to break free from 20-year old mindsets, backup tools, and siloed approaches to data management that burden Ops and Dev teams and restrict agility between data centers and Cloud," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO and Founder of Actifio. "Data and particularly databases in Microsoft Azure need to be available on-demand, instantly, via an API, not stuck in an archaic backup format. Actifio copy data virtualization is allowing our customers to get their data into Azure, build SQL-as-a-service capabilities to speed up their development pipelines and satisfy board-level requirements for rapid disaster recovery."

Actifio Sky, version 7.0 is now available on the Azure Marketplace, here. Actifio OnVault for Azure Blob as a target storage pool is planned for later this year.