Copy data virtualisation company Actifio has announced a series of new features and functional enhancements aimed at better supporting the growing number of customers leveraging its patented Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology in support of DevOps use cases.
Large enterprises are increasingly viewing infrastructure as a commodity, while applications are becoming more strategic. Managing the flow of data that powers applications presents a range of challenges at every stage of their life cycle.
These include: lengthy turnaround time from creation to delivery; complex management of data and the need to maintain access to information, which forces businesses to choose overly expensive point products to meet compliance requirements.
Harold van Graan, Sales Director, Actifio South Africa, notes that with continued pressure on IT budgets and the requirement to develop applications faster, the company is seeing increased market demand to virtualise data, and in doing so, make it available anywhere and at any time to anyone with the right access.
"In the South African market, we are increasingly seeing a need to: reduce non-productive infrastructure while allowing developers and business users to self-provision data. This in turn speeds development cycle time," says Van Graan.
He adds that companies that have invested in infrastructure virtualisation fail to gain the full benefits of these technologies because the data needs to be virtualised as well, otherwise developers still wait for IT to provision data to them.
"The Actifio solution is comprehensive and application-centric. It automates the full life cycle of application data management."
New features include:
* Authorised developers, DBAs, and data scientists can now access fresh copies of production data securely and instantly.
* Operations are now able to better support users with self-service data access built for the enterprise.
* Simplified protection of test/dev environments - administrators are able to protect, replicate, and restore clones used for test/dev environments, while minimising the need for storage.
* Enhancements to the popular LogSmart feature - users can go beyond recovery and mount a database at any point in time for application development, testing, analysis and more.
* Next generation of Actifio's powerful Resiliency Director.
"Actifio improves application development by letting customers build faster, easier and less expensive apps. It improves code quality and time to market. Once an application is live in production, Actifio improves data protection, access, and control. Moreover, it integrates the concept of application retirement, enabling not just access to historical data, but access to entire applications already decommissioned from production," says Van Graan.
IDC (market research firm) Program Director for Application Lifecycle Management and Executive Strategies, Melinda-Carol Ballou, says life cycle data management often results in costly inefficiencies and software delivery delays. "Actifio's offering creates new use cases that improve user options to help create business agility, resilience and cloud access. This technology - coupled with appropriate usage and process adoption - eases the impact of managing data for customers."
Ash Ashutosh, Actifio Founder and CEO, adds: "Actifio delivers full life cycle application data management in a way no other provider can, across the varying requirements of application development, management, and retirement. We do it by virtualising copy data, freeing application data from the constraints of the infrastructure it was created on. In the process, we free customers from the wasted time, cost, and complexity of data management models architected for the 20th century. And that changes everything."
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