Last week, Takeshi Numoto, Corporate Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, announced on the Official Microsoft Blog that Microsoft has acquired InMage Systems, Inc., an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity. This acquisition will accelerate our strategy to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others.

Azure Site Recovery already supports disaster recovery between on-premises Hyper-V clouds or from an on-premises Hyper-V cloud to Microsoft Azure, enabling a consistent user experience across enterprise private clouds, workloads on hosted clouds or in Microsoft Azure. With the InMage acquisition, Azure Site Recovery further delivers on Microsoft’s promise of enabling best-in-class business continuity solutions for any workload running on Microsoft clouds and Microsoft workloads hosted on any cloud.

Today we are announcing the availability of InMage Scout for Windows and Linux as part of the Azure Site Recovery subscription license offering. The Azure Site Recovery subscription license allows customers to purchase annual protection for instances with InMage Scout software and the Azure Site Recovery cloud service. Azure Site Recovery is licensed per virtual or per physical instance protected.

The Azure Site Recovery subscription license will be available through the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement beginning August 1, 2014 and is the only offer through which InMage Scout usage may currently be purchased. Customers can also continue to protect instances with the Azure Site Recovery cloud service via the existing consumption based offers. Between July 16, 2014 and August 1, 2014 InMage Scout software available on the Azure portal can be used on a trial basis at no charge.

Whether you are an enterprise thinking of your business continuity plan or a hosting service provider offering Disaster Recovery as a Service for your customers, the inclusion of InMage Scout in the Azure Site Recovery portfolio makes the Microsoft disaster recovery offering a one-stop business continuity solution for your heterogeneous environment.

Getting started with Azure Site Recovery and protecting your physical and virtual workloads is easy. Just download and install InMage Scout from the Azure Site Recovery portal – here’s how:

On the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery portal quick start page, under SETUP RECOVERY, you will now see a new drop-down option that says “Between two on-premises VMware sites.” This is in addition to the two options that we already have “Between two on-premises Hyper-V sites” and “Between an on-premises Hyper-V site and Microsoft Azure.”

Once you select the option to setup recovery between two on-premises VMware sites, you will be able to download InMage Scout:

The downloaded InMage Scout package comes with a quick install guide and other detailed documentation to get you started.

We are very excited to welcome InMage Scout into our portfolio of hybrid cloud disaster recovery solutions and further deliver on our promise of No Workload Left Behind – Physical or Virtual!

To experience the benefits that Azure Site Recovery offers, check out our product page to get started. You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers.