MONROE, La. -- A comprehensive disaster recovery architecture requires careful planning and robust technology. To make this easier for CenturyLink customers, we’re excited to announce the acquisition of DataGardens Inc., a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider based in Edmonton, Alberta. 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.

Listen to any CIO and you’ll hear that business continuity is a critical component of a healthy IT portfolio. However, only 23 percent of technology professionals think that they can get their IT systems back up and running after disaster. This might explain why Forrester is seeing a growing number of enterprises turn to cloud and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

CenturyLink and DataGardens have a longstanding partnering relationship and formed a closer cloud relationship earlier this year. DataGardens’ flagship software suite, SafeHaven, provides cloud-based disaster recovery by creating an offsite virtual data center in locations such as CenturyLink Cloud. Customers can define recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, and quickly failover and failback with minimal disruption to mission-critical systems. In addition, SafeHaven delivers point-and-click test failover and failback functions that simplify disaster recover testing without affecting production data.

The DataGardens technology platform is ideal for small to midsize business (SMB) customers or enterprise departments that cannot tolerate unexpected downtime, but have traditionally seen disaster recovery as too expensive or complicated to set up. With this disaster recovery software suite, customers can quickly set up a redundant cloud architecture that protects them from stress events such as unplanned outages or local hardware failures.

With DataGardens, CenturyLink acquires a mature platform and impressive set of technologists and leaders. The product offers multiple deployment options, “protection groups” that ensure that a pool of servers stay consistent, DR planning options, and many other capabilities that demonstrate a thoughtful design and practical technology strategy. The diagram below shows one such deployment model where both physical and virtual resources are mirrored to a recovery group in the CenturyLink Cloud.

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