Verizon Partners with Actifio on Cloud Backup

5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud

As part of an overall strategy to make its cloud service the preferred destination of backing up files with enterprise IT organizations, Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced it has partnered with Actifio, a provider of data virtualization tools that make it simpler to copy and move data between on-premise IT environments and a public cloud service.

Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh says that while cloud computing is by definition hybrid, one of the biggest challenges that IT organizations face today is moving data between their own data center and public cloud computing services. To address that issue, Ashutosh says Actifio created a Virtual Data Pipeline platform that essentially decouples the management of data from the underlying physical storage systems it resides on.

The Actifio Virtual Data Pipeline works by first identifying a gold instance of data in the enterprise that becomes the reference point from which all other copies are made. After that initial process, the Virtual Data Pipeline then only ingests actual changes to blocks of data versus requiring IT organizations to copy the entire data set again in order to back it up. The result is a much more efficient approach to moving data between on-premise IT environments and public clouds.

Actifio already supports a number of other public clouds to give IT organizations flexibility in terms of embracing multiple cloud computing environments, without requiring them to lift and shift an existing IT environment into a public cloud. Instead, Ashutosh says, they treat those public clouds as a more natural extension of their IT environment.

As internal IT organizations continue to exercise more control over usage of public clouds, it’s clear that most of the issues they will encounter ultimately come down to data management. On the upside of that equation, however, are advances in data virtualization that are helping to make managing data strewn across multiple data centers a lot less painful than ever before.