Actifio Cloud-Centric Sky Platform 8.0

Actifio, Inc. unveiled the 8.0 version of its Sky Platformh, designed to accelerate the pace of enterprise digital transformation with cloud native capabilities.

This release is the result of over two and a half years of research and collaboration with enterprises, partners and industry analysts.

Sky Platform 8.0 is a cloud-centric solution enabling enterprises to accelerate critical digital transformation initiatives for application development, analytics, data protection, HA and compliance by leveraging the agility and economics of public and private cloud solutions. With a single Sky Platform, enterprises are executing a crawl-walk-run IT transformation strategy and harnessing cloud solutions for appropriate workloads, including cloud-native applications, rather than an all-or-nothing, lift-and-shift ‘cloud strategy.’

The new platform introduces five features, in addition to comprehensive updates across the board, that reinforce Actifio’s place as the most mature platform on the market:

• Cloud Native – Enterprise grade data management for cloud native applications in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.
• Cloud Mobility – Enables hybrid cloud deployments across on-premises physical or virtual servers and cloud platforms. It delivers instant access to data and improved business resiliency and agility.
• Cloud Object – Unleash the power of object storage with technology innovations to enable instant data access for application development, analytics applications, low RPO and RTO DR and long-term data retention for archival and compliance, on-premises or in the cloud. Support currently for Amazon Web Services S3 and S3 IAS, Microsoft Azure Blob, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Google Nearline and Coldline, Dell EMC ECS, Hitachi HCP, Netapp StorageGRID, Wasabi and Scality.
• Cloud Catalog – Cloud-scale catalog for all applications and data, anywhere, delivering fastest times to find, access and use data. Native catalog API forms the foundation for new data-centric IT-analytics and business-decision-analytics applications.
• Cloud Engage – Pioneering user engagement platform serving as the foundation for deriving more value out of Actifio Data-as-a-Service for analytics, reporting, new data-centric applications and enablement.

Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO, Actifio, stated: “Data is at the heart of business transformation to a digital enterprise. For over seven years we’ve enabled enterprises to leverage their data as a strategic asset to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives for application development, analytics, data protection and compliance. Our relentless focus on customer success led us to a close collaboration with our users and partners who believe in cloud solutions as part of their IT strategy, not ‘the cloud strategy.’ Together, we delivered practical solutions to help them leverage the agility and economics of the emerging public and private cloud infrastructure and services, without the traditional constraints of vendor lock-ins, platform limitations or mobility. I want to express my sincere appreciation for the incredible work by several hundreds of individuals across our users, partners, and Actifio. The result is the biggest software release in the history of the company since our inception hat combines the speed, agility and economics of Actifio’s Data-as-a-Service with cloud based Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings. We are looking forward to further accelerating the pace of innovation and transformation for our users.”

“We are extremely excited about Actifio 8.0 as it gives us the ability to natively write to our cost-effective Private Object Storage platform or leverage object storage in the cloud,” said Abdul Altamimi, CTO, Atlanta-based RestorePoint, Inc. “Our clients can globally search for data regardless of where it is stored, easily mount the data in a virtual environment, and recover just what they need in a fraction of the time. Actifio 8.0 is built to tackle the challenges our clients face today, as well as ones they may likely face while moving and storing data in the hybrid cloud in the future.”

In terms of performance, Altamimi continued: “We tried the new cloud object feature in our multi-tenant data center. Actifio’s ability to replicate incremental forever to IBM Cleversafe Object Storage in our cloud with instant recovery got us interested right away. We recovered a 5TB SQL database in just over 3 minutes, compared to the several hours it typically takes. No block storage at all, and no networking bottlenecks. This is a game changer because it drastically reduces my TCO and delivers a great recovery SLA.”

According to Phil Goodwin, IDC research director, “The data revolution is increasing the amount data stored by more than 2.5 EBs every day and this data is quickly becoming the world’s most valuable resource. Actifio aims to work closely with customers to create and enrich a virtual data platform that meets the rising challenges of the modern data economy. IT organizations are looking for these types of solutions to make a faster digital transformation and use their own data in the cloud.”

Henry Baltazar, research VP, storage, 451 Research, stated: “Actifio has established a track record of success with enterprises and service providers in backup and recovery by pioneering enterprise Data as a Service. In recent years they have extended that into a true data platform than can empower application development, database, analytics and other teams with access to the data they need as they help transform their organizations. Speed, agility and security are all critical to these use cases and the Actifio platform has the potential to capitalize on this expanding opportunity particularly as more workloads migrate to the cloud.”

“Overpromising and under delivering is almost a hallmark of data protection and data management companies,” said George Crump, lead analyst and founder, Storage Switzerland. “Actifio has separated itself from the pack with an eight year track record of technology innovation that has set a high bar in the protection and management of data. Now with their latest release, Actifio 8.0, they are well positioned to help their customers as they transition to cloud-first data management.“

“A few years ago Actifio was the only visionary company building disruptive data management strategies, and now we see a range of vendors trying to deliver similar capabilities,” said Jason Buffington, principal analyst, ESG. “With the announcement of 8.0, Actifio continues its innovation and leadership with their cloud-centric strategy to unleash the full power of their customer’s data. By providing the ability to immediately recover and enable data access across a range of cloud providers, Actifio is raising the bar once again on the landscape of data management.”