Microsoft acquires disaster recovery solutions firm InMage to strengthen Azure

Microsoft has acquired InMage to improve hybrid cloud business continuity solutions and make Azure the top choice for disaster recovery for enterprise servers worldwide.

The deal was announced on the official Microsoft blog.

InMage offers backup and disaster recovery technology for the enterprise market and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), allowing businesses to use a single solution that protects virtual, physical, UNIX and database systems, rather than having to use multiple products.

Microsoft says that the concept of business continuity — backups, replication and the quick recovery of data and applications in the case of system failure — is rapidly becoming an important consideration in today's business environment, especially as revenue, supply chains, customer loyalty, employee productivity and more rely on these systems to function efficiently.

However, due to the expense associated with such services, corporations often don't have "the budget or time to do it right."

This is where InMage comes in. The Redmond giant says the purchase will accelerate the firm's strategy to provide "hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others." Once InMage's technology is integrated within the Azure platform, the company hopes this will make Azure "the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world."

With the completion of the acquisition, InMage technology will be integrated within the Azure Site Recovery service, and existing customers will be able to continue to use InMage products. Eventually, InMage subscribers will gain access to Scout through Azure Site Recovery.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Laura DuBois, Research Vice President for IDC said the acquisition is a "great move to meet important customer needs with the cloud as a target for disaster recovery," what she deems to be "a poorly understood and underserved market."

Takeshi Numoto, Corporate Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft said:

Enterprise customers are looking for the best, most valuable ways to take advantage of the cloud. Business continuity is often a great place to start, which is why we are very focused on delivering strong solutions in this area for our customers. It 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.