American telecommunications giant CenturyLink has acquired Canadian disaster recovery specialist DataGardens. The company offers disaster recovery in the cloud, and has maintained a partnership with CenturyLink for a while.

CenturyLink hopes this latest purchase will improve the functionality of its cloud offering – a fairly new business model for a traditional telco.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Resilient cloud
DataGardens, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, offers Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) – its SafeHaven software mirrors physical or virtual machine data to a highly available cloud environment. In the event of a failure, the software will instantly switch and run applications from a secure, cloud-based virtual data center.

The DRaaS service is an affordable way to minimize disruption to mission-critical systems, especially suitable for smaller businesses.

DataGardens offers a range of other options – for example recovery from cloud to cloud, or from a private data center to another private facility. SafeHaven also delivers point-and-click test failover and failback functions that simplify testing without affecting production data.

The two companies have had a partnership in place already, with DataGardens providing a version of SafeHaven designed specifically for the CenturyLink Cloud. Now, this functionality will move in-house.

CenturyLink has used acquisitions to evolve from a traditional telecommunications provider into a full spectrum cloud vendor. In 2011 it acquired Savvis, a global cloud infrastructure provider, for US$2.5 billion. And in 2013, it purchased Tier 3, a major US-based cloud company, for an undisclosed amount.

Earlier this month, CenturyLink announced its intention to become the first company to have its entire portfolio of data centers evaluated by the Uptime Institute in an effort to achieve its Management & Operations certification.