Congruity360 Congruity360 Q4 2017 Sponsored Tech Note

Getting to Know Congruity360

  1. Getting to Know Congruity360
  2. A Conversation with Congruity360 COO Mark Shirman
  3. The Great Congruity360 Data Migration
  4. Congruity360 Opens a Historic Data Center
  5. Congruity360: A Confluence of Services

If the name Congruity360 isn’t immediately familiar, don’t worry, you haven’t fallen out of the IT loop. The company was established in 2017 after a merger with Congruity and KNJ. Congruity itself was only established in 2016 after a prior merger between Rockland IT and MSDI. All this adds up to a company with a long legacy in data management, but without a lot of name recognition.

As a side effect, getting to know Congruity360 can be a little intimidating at first. Most new companies have a laser focused portfolio, maybe offering a single platform or product, with others in the pipeline. This isn’t the case with Congruity360. Instead what you find is a fairly comprehensive product portfolio around data management and protection.

Storage as a Service

For starters, they offer a complete suite of Storage as a Service offerings. This includes everything from disaster recovery to replication, archiving, and information governance. DRaaS looks like a really interesting offering, designed to give organizations versatile options. This can be configured to utilize both cloud sites (public, private, and hybrid), as well as on and off-site targets, including Congruity360’s data center. On top of this, the company will work with companies on their RTO and RPO requirements to make sure their DR strategy makes sense for their business.

Their archiving and replication don’t focus so much on versatility, but rather simplicity. These are SLA-backed services that offer organizations turnkey business solutions to meet regulatory and compliance needs. Their archiving solution should be of particular interest to organizations with a lot of legacy storage looking to make the digital transformation. This supports automated tiering to move your data across media and to the cloud based on your specifications and business needs.

These services certainly aren’t novel in their scope. But that’s not what a mature business is looking for anyway. Instead, these fill a vital business need, allowing organizations to quickly deploy modern IT infrastructure without having to blow up their existing processes. Given Congruity360’s decades long corporate legacy in data management, it gives a degree of assurance on service quality to these organizations.

SkySolutions

The other major part of their portfolio are their Managed SkySolutions. These are completely managed solutions living in their private cloud. The benefits of these are clear to any organization that need modern agility and scale, but struggle with retraining IT and sinking in capital expenditures.

All of these solutions are housed in Congruity360’s Fall River, MA data center, a 200,000 square foot facility with full HIPAA, SOCII and PCI compliance. Congruity360 also likes to brag that it’s really secure. Ordinarily I wouldn’t comment on this, but their data sheet says the data center features “below floor laser motion detection,” which makes it sound cool to my inner child.

Coming from five-years working at a midsize law firm, many of the Managed SkySolutions seem custom made for that kind of organization. The standout is SkyDiscovery, their managed unified archive solution. Data retention in law is often an inconsistent mess, often requiring long term retention and frequent expunging of records to stay in compliance. SkyDiscovery offers real time search across the archive. While this has obvious implications for simple discovery, it also vastly simplifies the process of allowing organizations to assess what they are actually archiving, and removing worry about where it is.

Data creation and retention is only going to accelerate for all types of organizations. Archiving is vital to deal with this, but for a business to thrive, these archives also need to be actionable. It’s not enough to simply know what data is cold or hot and tiering it appropriately (although that’s vital too). Organizations have to be able to search across it and derive business insights as well. SkyDiscovery offers this headache free as a managed service.

Congruity360 – An Old Soul with a New Name

The breadth of Congruity360’s offerings underlies that this isn’t a new company coming out of stealth. They’re the result of decades of data management experience merged into a new name. As IT is increasingly consumed by data, data management becomes the primary mission of IT. In that sense, the services that Congruity360 offers become simply IT management services. On top of what I’ve covered here, they also offer a suite of professional services, from data center consultations, to installations, migrations, and storage assessments.

Coming out of a series of mergers, Congruity360 is uniquely constituted to offer a comprehensive IT management offering. This is centered around storage as a service offerings, but when factoring in their SkySolutions, there are very few parts of the data center that they can’t manage for your organization. It’s an impressive breadth for potential customers.

About the author

Rich Stroffolino

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.

1 Comment

  • […] In our first post, I gave an overview of Congruity360’s corporate history and portfolio. The company has an impressive suite of managed services for organizations to leverage, providing vital business needs with a minimum of IT hassle. At Storage Field Day last week, the company zeroed in on one particular offering, one that’s increasingly relevant to modern enterprises. […]

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