These days you’ll find data at the center of the high-technology universe exerting its influence on companies and projects both big and small. Look at any of the current mega trends — machine learning, “internet of things,” cloud storage — and exponentially increasing data is the common critical factor.

“It just comes back to that data. … Those lightweight elements of applications are so easy to move, and then we just get stuck with this big gravitational pull of data,” said Brian Reagan (pictured), chief marketing officer of Actifio Inc.

Reagan spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed how development operations leverages Actifio’s data as a service platform to virtualize data for easy and fast access.

It’s all about the (data)base

Popular myth may preach that the public cloud is going to be easier and cheaper, but according to Reagan, that isn’t true if you have an unwieldy database slowing down your developer operations. Actifio has been helping companies blast out of big data’s gravitational force for the past nine years, virtualizing data through its DaaS platform for secure back-up, portability and accessibility for developmental analytics.

Described recently by a Gartner analyst as both “disruptive and proven,” Actifio is proud of its reputation as an infrastructure-agnostic company that gives customers the freedom to choose where to store their data, as well as to port data from cloud to cloud as they see fit.

Reagan classified Actifio’s customers into one of three camps: First is the camp that, due to regulation or internal policy, uses Actifio’s platform to power a proprietary cloud behind a secure firewall. The second camp consists of traditional companies that have fully adopted cloud technology. And the third camp includes companies that were “born in the cloud.” While this final group takes full advantage of the power of the public cloud, it requires Actifio to provide secure, cost-effective back-up.

“We thrive in environments where data is growing and growing fast, we thrive where data is regulated or under some sort of internal or external pressure around management, and we really thrive in environments and industries that are truly embracing this digital transformation,” Reagan said.

An unusual use-case scenario Reagan pointed to was how trash-disposal giant Waste Industries USA Inc. has leveraged Actifio’s data virtualization services to innovate and optimize its business. “They instrument their trucks, they instrument with sensors their canisters, they do route optimizations based on data that they’re getting from all of these devices, so their chief informational officer is fond of saying they’re not in the internet of things; they’re in the internet of trash,” Reagan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE