Microsoft's latest acquisition is the company's first step to provide the best and affordable service for business continuity which has been ranked by most businesses as their top priority. After introducing the Azure Site Recovery last month, Microsoft plans to make it the best disaster retrieving site with the purchase of InMage.
InMage provides revolutionary advancements in Disaster Recovery and Backup technology for businesses labeled as Enterprises and Managed Service Providers. The company helps enterprises in migrating public and private cloud-based data, cloud replicate their assets, and retrieve data on dire situations. Their flagship product, Scout, is available as a cloud platform as well as on appliances used in backup and disaster recovery. The latter, which caters to small and midsize businesses, was launched in a series of 4000 and aimed at businesses that seek petabyte-size data protection.
Azure Site Recovery, known previously as Hyper-V Recovery Manager, was introduced by Microsoft last month. The site is designed to provide enterprises with a cloud-based option in building and maintaining their company's remote sites when disaster recovery is sought.
Microsoft will integrate Scout with its Azure Site Recovery providing service to make the latter the best site for disaster recovery. It will be compatible with each and every type of IT environments such as Linux and Windows, physical and web-based, and VMware and Hyper-V.
Current Scout customers would still be able to access the products and services of InMage. New customers would gain access through the Azure Site Recovery. Furthermore, Microsoft confirms that the company will continue working with InMage's current service providing partners and look forward to working with new partners as well. Mutual customers of the two merged companies will enjoy several products and services on a wider scale.
The research VP of International Data Corporation (IDC), Laura DuBois, sees that Microsoft's acquisition of InMage as "a great move to meet important customer needs with the cloud as a target for disaster recovery."
Microsoft has always believed that the majority of enterprises depend on hybrid-cloud solutions. With InMage's innovative technology, it will help make their product Azure "the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world," says corporate VP Takeshi Numoto of the company's cloud and enterprise marketing department. He further adds that the acquisition 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."
