Microsoft and Symantec team up to implement a management solution and disaster recovery in Windows Azure cloud platform.
Symantec said it will expand the availability of Symantec Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Volume Replicator high disaster recovery software solution platform in Windows Azure cloud.
The agreement was announced at the recent Microsoft TechEd 2012 conference, ensuring that the solution from Microsoft and Symantec will go one step in traditional backup systems, extending the Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows and Veritas Volume Replicator disaster recovery (DR) to the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform.
The company said it will allow organizations to recover critical business applications and associated data in Windows Azure in the case of a local site failure or disaster.
The solution is to develop the capacity of existing Symantec solutions for business continuity for Microsoft, providing onsite to cloud disaster recovery as a service.
“Windows Azure is growing rapidly as a platform, and we are seeing many of our customers utilizing it as part of a new delivery model for computing resources,” said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group. “With Symantec’s proven high-availability technology, and Microsoft’s cloud platform, organizations can rest assured that their business will keep running in cases of disasters and outages.”
Data is also duplicated to the disaster recovery site as a place close to the customer so that applications can run without a significant decrease in overall performance.
“Windows Azure is designed to provide resilience and availability,” Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president of developer and platform evangelism at Microsoft, said in a statement. “Symantec’s service aims to extend the built-in reliability of Windows Azure and help customers recover on-premises applications and data with a disaster recovery and business continuity solution utilizing complementary technology from both Symantec and Microsoft.”
The partnership was previously extended around Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization technology. The addition of Windows Azure will further enhance security and backup solutions offerings of Microsoft cloud platform.
A recent survey from Symantec found that SMBs are taking advantage of cloud technology to better prepare if disaster strikes. Technologies like cloud computing, virtualization and mobility is assisting companies to improve their ability to recover from a disaster. According to the survey, almost half of the respondents opt to tap private cloud computing because of disaster preparedness.
Microsoft cloud service recently boosted with the inclusion of Linux distributions for deployment from its Windows Azure cloud service.
