Bangalore: Two of the biggest giants in tech world, Microsoft and Symantec have patched up to develop a disaster recovery service that helps enterprises to protect data and applications. Reports say that Microsoft will be incorporating their Azure cloud platform services with Symantec’s storage software to create new disaster recovery software that helps to protect critical data at the time of disaster or failure.

According to the officials of both companies, this ground breaking idea will provide a ‘disaster recovery as a service’ for firms of all sizes so that they will be able to recover their critical data at the any time of event failure.

According to Deepak Mohan, Senior vice president of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group “Windows Azure is growing rapidly as a platform, and we are seeing many of our customers utilizing it as part of a new delivery model for computing resources. With Symantec’s proven high-availability technology, and Microsoft’s cloud platform, organizations can rest assured that their business will keep running in cases of disasters and outages.”

According to Symantec officials, the standout feature of this software is that enterprises will not be able to retrieve their data but also can protect their applications. The officials also added that organizations that are using Symantec’s Veritas solutions in their data centers have an additional advantage of expanding their solutions into Microsoft’s Azure cloud. At the time of disaster, an automated process gears up and it replicates the data and applications to the cloud.

Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president of developer and platform evangelism at Microsoft exclaimed that “Windows Azure is designed to provide resilience and availability. Symantec’s service aims to extend the built-in reliability of Windows Azure and help customers recover on-premises applications and data with a disaster recovery and business continuity solution utilizing complementary technology from both Symantec and Microsoft.”

The recovery software is expected to be released next year as the two is also partnering in platforms like Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization technology.