Google To Acquire Actifio To Beef Up Google Cloud Data Protection

Google is planning to acquire cloud-focused data protection technology developer Actifio in a move to better protect enterprise workloads both on-premises and in the cloud.

Google, which Wednesday unveiled the planned acquisition in a blog post by Brad Calder, the tech giant’s vice president of engineering, said Actifio will be an important part of protecting data on Google Cloud.

“As organizations across industries sharpen their disaster preparedness strategies and infrastructure resiliency, Actifio’s business continuity solutions will help Google Cloud customers prevent data loss and downtime due to external threats, network failures, human errors and other disruptions,” Calder wrote in the blog.

[Related: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh: The Future Will Include Storage Designed For Apps, Not Infrastructure]

Waltham, Mass.-based Actifio referred press inquiries for further information to Google. Google did not respond to a CRN request for further information by press time other than to acknowledge receipt of the request.

No value was given for the acquisition. Actifio is a privately held company that has raised over $350 million in venture funding from such investors as Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management. The company has been valued at more than $1 billion.

Actifio is the developer of a multi-cloud copy data management software platform that provides lifecycle management of virtual copies of data in their native format, with full application awareness and global data mobility.

The platform‘s APIs allow it to seamlessly integrate with third-party IT service management tools, devops tools, or custom-built scripts and applications.

The most recent version, Actifio 10c, was aimed at reducing the cost and burden of working with the cloud to simplify cloud disaster recovery and data migration, increasing the flexibility of working with containers to accelerate application testing and reduce development costs, and making it easier to back up data and use those backups for rapid database cloning and analytics.

Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh earlier this year explained that Actifio takes a unique approach to cloud-based data protection and management.

Actifio starts from the application down to build a software platform that truly uses applications and portions of the applications as the objects to manage, whereas most other storage vendors are moving from the data up into the management side.

“[We started] out really early with a focus on managing the life cycle of the applications, and allowing the users to choose the best infrastructure available,” he told CRN at the time. “Which is why in 2016, when we first saw the emergence of cloud platforms, within a year and a half we were able to port to seven different public cloud platforms. A SaaS offering we announced in February [2019] supports AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud and [more].”

Google’s Calder wrote that Actifio helps customers increase business availability across cloud-native and hybrid environments; automatically back up and protect data from workloads ranging from enterprise data bases to virtual machines, physical servers, and Google Compute Engine; and accelerates application development and reduce devops cycles.

“We know that customers have many options when it comes to cloud solutions, including backup and DR, and the acquisition of Actifio will help us to better serve enterprises as they deploy and manage business-critical workloads, including in hybrid scenarios,” he wrote. “In addition, we are committed to supporting our backup and DR technology and channel partner ecosystem, providing customers with a variety of options so they can choose the solution that best fits their needs.”