Microsoft has acquired InMage to improve its disaster recovery solutions

Disaster recovery ain’t the sexiest area of computing. But companies don’t hesitate to throw cash at technology that can save the day in an emergency, and Microsoft wants to get in on that. So Microsoft has bought a company called InMage, which Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing, described in a blog post today as “an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity.” From a corporate perspective, one could sort of mash it under Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s dictum yesterday that “at our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.” Microsoft has lately become more willing to serve as a platform that can accept workloads from all over the place, not just Microsoft-centric applications. Microsoft has previously added support for Linux operating systems in Azure. And the other day Microsoft came out as a backer of the Google-initiated open-source Linux container manager Kubernetes. “Microsoft will help contribute code to Kubernetes to enable customers to easily manage containers that can run anywhere. This will make it easier to build multi-cloud solutions including targeting Microsoft Azure” Microsoft cloud chief Scott Guthrie said in a canned statement about the news. The InMage deal drives Microsoft down a related path. The deal will help Microsoft support lots of environments, including “Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware, or others,” Numoto wrote in today’s blog post.