CenturyLink Adds Canadian DRaaS Company DataGardens to Cloud Portfolio

CenturyLink (CTL) has acquired Edmonton, Alberta-based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) provider DataGardens. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Jonathan King, CenturyLink’s vice president of cloud strategy, said he believes the DataGardens acquisition will allow his company to fully integrate DRaaS into its network.

“Disaster recovery is one of the top services companies are looking to outsource, and CenturyLink sees DRaaS as a core cloud platform offering,” he told Talkin’ Cloud. “We want to ensure a seamless disaster recovery solution for our customers.”

CenturyLink noted it plans to integrate DataGardens’ DRaaS toolset into its product portfolio.

“This [acquisition] is big news for our customers because it gives them a cost-effective and innovative way to mirror physical or virtual machine data to a highly available cloud environment,” CenturyLink wrote in a blog post.

What’s next for CenturyLink in the DRaaS market?

CenturyLink and DataGardens began working together in April, and the DataGardens’ SafeHaven cloud-based disaster recovery software suite provides an offsite virtual data center in CenturyLink Cloud.

Andrew Higginbotham, CenturyLink Cloud’s senior vice president, told Gigaom that his company now hopes to accelerate a product roadmap to bring cloud-based disaster recovery that works between public clouds as well as between public clouds and private OpenStack-based clouds.

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CenturyLink also pointed out that the DataGardens acquisition ultimately will provide customers with multiple DR planning options and many other capabilities that demonstrate “a thoughtful design and practical technology strategy.”

“The acquisition provides CenturyLink an opportunity to deepen disaster recovery integration with our current offerings and deliver an end-to-end experience for our customers,” King said. “DataGardens’ technology is also applicable for cloud migration strategies, including creating replica environments so customers can transition to CenturyLink Cloud from other public and private clouds. We see great opportunities for hybrid cloud customers who leverage the public cloud as an alternate site for key applications.”

CenturyLink customers should expect a related DRaaS product announcement in the coming months, according to King.

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