IBM Launches Smart Cloud for Disaster Recovery and Data Archive

IBM IBM today announced new cloud services that enable clients to protect, store and retrieve their most critical data in minutes versus days in the event of a disaster. Disasters - whether from hurricanes, earthquakes or IT failures - can cause significant damage to businesses in the loss of crucial data and revenue. Analyst estimates state that the loss of revenue during downtime is tens of thousands of dollars for every hour. Businesses need to assess threat risks and create a resilience strategy that helps ensure uninterrupted business operations and enables speed and agility when an unforeseen event strikes. The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services allow customers to protect their data and applications faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner than they could before within a traditional data center environment. Historically, companies created numerous images of servers and applications at running at multiple sites, adding to the complexity and cost of IT management. Now, the IBM SmartCloud offers companies of various sizes a virtual and physical server recovery service that continuously replicates their applications and all associated data on a secure cloud infrastructure. This enables them to have their business up and running in minutes after declaring an outage in their IT infrastructure. By using the IBM cloud, organizations can more easily and cost effectively provide continuous service to their customers and ensure that their data and applications are protected and secure. IBM's cloud allows clients to securely manage and balance workloads, lower application and system downtime, and reduce data loss. These services help clients to avoid capital expense by more efficiently monitoring operational expenses and service levels, reducing the burden on IT staff. "Now more than ever, companies are relying on a massive amount of data to run their businesses, storing it longer and retrieving it as needed," said Rick Ruiz, general manager of IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services. "This creates a need for a business resilience strategy that will ensure continuous operation and create a competitive advantage to enable growth opportunities. Our new cloud services bring flexibility, scalability, and rapid provisioning to help accomplish that."