CenturyLink acquires DataGardens, adds disaster recovery to cloud portfolio

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is acquiring DataGardens, a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider based in Edmonton, Alberta, a move that immediately enhances the disaster recovery capabilities of its cloud service portfolio.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

By making this acquisition, CenturyLink will be able to give its customers a way to mirror physical or virtual machine data in a cloud environment if a man-made or natural disaster takes down their site.

Customers would be able to use DataGardens' software suite SafeHaven, which provides cloud-based disaster recovery by creating an offsite virtual data center in locations such as CenturyLink Cloud.

Two of the key targets for SafeHaven software suite are the small to mid-size business (SMB) customers and enterprise departments that can't tolerate unexpected downtime, but do not have the financial or IT resources to set up a disaster recovery platform. CenturyLink said that SafeHaven will allow customers to define recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives and quickly failover and failback with minimal disruption to mission-critical systems.

In addition, the service offers multiple deployment options, or "protection groups" that ensure that a pool of servers stays consistent, DR planning options and several other capabilities.

While the acquisition is new, CenturyLink and DataGardens are not strangers as the two companies began a cloud partnership earlier this year.

CenturyLink may continue to command a growing influence in the data center and cloud services space by expanding its data center presence in the U.S. and in major international markets in Asia-Pacific and Europe, but the service provider has been equally aggressive on enhancing its cloud capabilities.

Besides DataGardens, the service provider enhanced its cloud application capabilities by acquiring Tier 3 and Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider AppFog.

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