Veritas today announced a multi-year, global strategic partnership with Microsoft.

The companies assert the relationship will help organisations use Microsoft Azure to optimise for hybrid cloud environments and to host Veritas' Enterprise Vault.cloud management and governance service on Azure.

The two have a history of longstanding relationships, and they affirm this will build on that background in addition to allowing collaboration to enable and jointly sell hybrid cloud storage solutions to mutual customers to provide a comprehensive, simple and cost effective approach to managing data in the cloud.

These hybrid cloud storage will solutions will apparently enable customers to take advantage of the cloud to reduce their storage costs while increasing business agility.

Executive vice president and chief product officer at Veritas, Mike Palmer says enterprises are increasingly relying on cloud computing to advance digital transformation.

“As Veritas embarks on its one-year anniversary as an independent company, today's announcement marks a pivotal milestone towards accelerating cloud initiatives for our mutual customers, and it begins with more efficient ways to move their data to the Azure cloud,” Palmer says.

Corporate vice president of the Microsoft Azure team, Jason Zander shares these sentiments.

“Microsoft and Veritas customers have enjoyed the benefits of highly complementary technology offerings, focused on solving IT challenges in the data center,” says Zander.

“Today, our strengthened partnership delivers deeper integration, allowing customers to more easily take advantage of the flexibility and enterprise-grade reliability that Azure provides.”

So, what are some of the main features of the partnership?

Veritas NetBackup 8.0 (the company's flagship data protection solution for enterprises) now supports storage tiering to Azure, which they assure will:

• Improve data lifecycle management
• Decrease costs
• Reduce the need to deploy additional storage with a separate point product

For small and midsized businesses, Veritas Backup Exec 16 now supports the seamless movement of backup data to Azure, which they assure will reduce time and costs while improving resource savings.

Veritas is also leveraging Azure to drive greater efficiencies for its own workloads by selecting Azure as the cloud backend on which to run its Enterprise Vault.cloud service.