Google LLC is acquiring Actifio Inc., a venture-backed data management startup, to enhance the data backup and recovery capabilities of its public cloud.

The deal was announced this morning. Actifio, founded in 2009, had raised more than $300 million from investors prior to the acquisition.

Actifio’s namesake data management platform can reduce the amount of time it takes to back up information by a factor of 20 compared with traditional tools, the startup claims. Enterprises usually back up records at regular intervals, such as the end of the work week, to ensure that they have a copy of the latest records created by employees.

Traditional tools work by creating a copy of both the newly created records and a company’s older data. Actifio, in contrast, backs up only the new information that has been added since the last copy, which makes the process more efficient. Less information translates into lower bandwidth costs for companies backing up their data over the web to a cloud platform such as Google Cloud.

Actifio also says its technology reduces the time it takes to recover data after an outage. That’s often even more important than backup speeds because the less time it takes to restore workloads, the faster a company can resume normal business operations.

Actifio’s software works with both on-premises infrastructure and the major public clouds, including Google Cloud. Brad Calder, Google’s vice president of technical infrastructure and cloud engineering, wrote in a blog post today that “Actifio will help us to better serve enterprises as they deploy and manage business-critical workloads, including in hybrid scenarios.” The emphasis on hybrid cloud use cases suggests that Actifio’s software will continue to be available for on-premise environments following the deal.

Actifio currently also supports Google Cloud’s main competitors, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. Given that the search giant has been pursuing an “open cloud” strategy of enabling customers to deploy applications across rival platforms, it’s quite possible Actifio’s platform will work with AWS and Azure. 

Data protection is not the only use case Google can target with the software it’s gaining through the deal. Actifio’s platform is underpinned by a technology called VDP that creates a “golden copy” of a dataset, say the contents of a MySQL deployment, and then shares it among multiple applications. VDP thereby removes the need to create separate copies of the data for each application that uses it. Google could offer the technology to customers as a way of reducing their cloud storage bills.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. 

Image: Google