
Telecom giant CenturyLink has grown to become a leading player in the cloud industry. With a series of strategic acquisitions forming the pillars of CenturyLink’s cloud including, managed hosting and colocation services provider Savvis, Platform-as-a-Service provider AppFog and Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier 3. They also announced the plans for several new data centers earlier this year. In yet another strategic move, CenturyLink has further strengthened their cloud offering with the acquisition of Alberta-based Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service provider DataGardens. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In a blog post on the CenturyLink cloud website the company wrote, “This 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… The acquisition announced today brings a proven disaster recovery offering into the CenturyLink Cloud portfolio and lets us more fully integrate this innovative toolset into our product suite.”
This is not the first time the two companies have come together. Back in April of this year, they announced the launch of SafeHaven for CenturyLink Cloud, a solution for customers of CenturyLink’s services. With this prior relationship we can expect CenturyLink has big plans for this five year old, 15 person company.
DataGardens’ platform is designed for small to midsize business (SMB) customers as well as enterprise departments that have previously been unable to implement disaster recovery services. SafeHaven, DataGardens’s flagship product, offers disaster recovery by creating an off-site virtual data center in a public cloud service to protect from unexpected issues and failures.
Jonathan King, vice president of cloud strategy and business development at CenturyLink said, “We saw our customers using the DataGardens tool and replicating workloads from client data center to our cloud platform for DR-as-a-Service. We also saw cloud-to-cloud recovery scenarios. This is a core platform attribute that we feel needs to be built in.”