Actifio Cloud Mobility: Accelerating Enterprise IT Cloud Adoption

Adopting public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) presents several advantages: machine types of various sizes which can be spun up on demand, rich network elements enabling creation of complex network topologies, highly scalable and durable storage offerings and much more. The managed nature of these IaaS offerings relieves organizations of certain operational burdens. Hence adoption of public cloud IaaS services can translate into tangible benefits such as increased business agility and flexibility, potentially reduced costs, etc. It comes as no surprise that many enterprises are exploring public clouds for a variety of use cases. 

Even though the majority of enterprise IT is still in the data center, organizations are drawn by the prospect of leveraging the public cloud to eliminate physical data centers, add more resiliency into their data architectures by leveraging highly durable storage offerings and leverage the elastic nature of the public cloud to expand and contract capacity on demand. This creates a need for robust data virtualization capabilities that works across all compute and application form factors found in the enterprise. Actifio Cloud Mobility is a suite of capabilities that enable enterprises to adopt public cloud on their own terms. With Cloud Mobility, Enterprise IT can:

• Virtualize virtual machines, physical servers and databases from infrastructure.
• Efficiently replicate data into high performance and cost effective cloud storage offerings.
• Convert machines to cloud native formats.
• Instantly bring up applications (machine+database+data) directly from object storage.

So, how does this work? It all begins with a robust core data virtualization engine, Actifio Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP). VDP simplifies cloud adoption to three enabling capabilities:

1. Capture:  As part of the capture, VDP captures system state and all metadata related to the bootable state of the machine. Additionally, VDP also captures an application consistent backup of databases. 
2. Replicate: Actifio’s replication capabilities can replicate on-prem data captured in the previous phase to cloud-based block and object storage targets. The data is incrementally updated. 
3. Recover: This is the capability that brings it all together. Users are interested in  instantiating an on-prem application in a cloud. Actifio Cloud Mobility and the VDP enables this with four key capabilities:
   1. Leverage the system state metadata from the capture phase to convert a VM/physical server into a cloud native instance.
   2. Leverage application awareness of Actifio VDP to instantly bring up a database on the recovered cloud native instance from the previous step.
   3. Leverage VDP’s Mount and Migrate capability transparently migrate the application to cloud native disks. 
   4. DR orchestration enabling one click DR for multi-tiered applications with complex dependencies. 

These foundational capabilities enable some very interesting use cases. With Actifio Cloud mobility, enterprises can:

• Leverage cloud as the DR data center and eliminate physical data centers.
• Build architectures that are resilient to zonal and regional outages
• Leverage Cloud Mobility as the migration engine to iteratively execute migrations of complex on-prem IT infrastructure to cloud with control.
• Reduce provisioning times and cost of running QA/Test environments in the cloud.
• Leverage Cloud Mobility’s support for multi-cloud to migrate applications from one cloud to another. 

For many enterprises, adopting cloud is not a one time activity. It’s often an iterative process involving a structured and phased approach of testing, tweaking and retesting to satisfy the needs of multiple stakeholders. Actifio provides the richest toolkit in the industry that enables a diverse set of use cases in the drive towards cloud adoption.