infoTECH Feature

December 09, 2014

Disaster Recovery Gets a Little Easier for CenturyLink with DataGardens Acquisition

There was once a Dilbert strip about disaster recovery, in which Alice revealed that the plan for disaster recovery involved a lot of running around and screaming. Alice further expressed the hope that, one day, the disaster recovery team would have a budget. We've come a long way since those days, of course, and now, disaster recovery is something businesses take seriously. For all the proof that could be asked for, just take a look at CenturyLink (News - Alert), who recently purchased DataGardens in a bid to drive its disaster recovery portfolio.

CenturyLink has itself come a long way from its original days as a telecommunications firm, and now offers a variety of cloud tools to supplement its lineup. With DataGardens, meanwhile, CenturyLink marks the final step in a partnership that started with CenturyLink adding DataGardens' services to its Safehaven for CenturyLink offering. This move allowed CenturyLink to offer a cloud-based disaster recovery product robust enough for most any needs, and allowed not only cloud-based but also on-premises offerings for maximum variety.

But in a more brass-tacks look, it was noted that DataGardens has about 15 employees to its name, doesn't disclose its revenue, and hasn't had any major funding sources infused into it from what anyone can tell. This in turn means that CenturyLink's acquisition of DataGardens was likely a good one for CenturyLink, one that should augment CenturyLink's offerings for a comparatively small sum. Plus, CenturyLink gets some clear advantages here, including being able to offer some powerful tools now and help shape development of new tools for future releasing.

Indeed, some have wondered why CenturyLink would bother acquiring DataGardens in the first place; the two firms already had a partnership arrangement together, so why take the step of making the formal acquisition? Some have wondered here if maybe DataGardens' systems don't have a few extra applications that haven't been revealed yet, and if that were the case, then acquiring DataGardens would make sure CenturyLink gets first access to those applications. Of course, beyond that, there's also the idea that disaster recovery in general has come a long way from the days when it was a Dilbert mockery target; IT practitioners are said to be routinely thinking about disaster recovery now, and that means there are likely to be plenty more purchases made in the way of disaster recovery, purchases that CenturyLink might well want a hand in.


It's true that disasters previously thought unlikely or even impossible—2012's Hurricane Sandy hitting New York, or last year's polar vortex and accompanying cold—seem to be showing up quite a bit more frequently than in years past. For CenturyLink to want ready access to a robust disaster planning system is a reasonable, smart idea, and one that's hard for most anyone to pass up. Throw in the value of cloud systems when it comes to operating a mobile workforce, and the overall picture becomes that much clearer; it could be that CenturyLink wants to be the big name in terms of providing cloud infrastructure for enterprise, and having disaster recovery tools on hand is just part of the package.

Only time will tell just where this all goes, but it's clear that CenturyLink has an idea of some kind it's moving to flesh out. DataGardens is clearly a big part of that idea, and should in turn make it truly something to see when it's all said and done.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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