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.
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 traditional data centre environment.
According to the company, by using the IBM cloud, organisations 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, GM 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.”
The new services include the IBM SmartCloud Virtualised Server Recovery tool and IBM SmartCloud Archive.
IBM claims that the server recovery tool increases the reliability and efficiency of recovery to help practically eliminate business downtime, and minimise data loss. It also provides clients with an easy-to-use portal for remote access to bring back their business on IBM’s recovery infrastructure in minutes in case of outage, not hours, replicating both server software and associated data continuously; eliminates the issues of recovery on physical non-like hardware and travel to disaster sites.
The SmartCloud Archive has been desgined specifically to meet stringent privacy and regulatory compliance, from advanced search and indexing and retrieval, to eDiscovery capabilities and is said to provide clients with an advanced document and record management system to deal with structured and unstructured content; control over rising data storage costs; and improved availability of critical business content.
IBM has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) since 2008 on a variety of information protection services, including building a comprehensive infrastructure recovery solution.
“With new regulations like compliance and increasing security and data demands on our network, we have made it a priority to protect our data and ensure we have the right disaster recovery plan in place,” said Jessica Carroll,MD, IT, USGA. “In working with IBM on this multi-year project and tapping their business resilience and cloud expertise, we have put in place a flexible infrastructure recovery solution that ensures the availability and resiliency of our core business functions.”
Other cloud-based business continuity tools include the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery (6.2), which is said to provide disaster recovery software that can be enabled as a cloud storage option.
The new services are a part of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio, consisting of next-generation, enterprise cloud technologies and services offerings for private, public and hybrid clouds based on IBM hardware, software, services and best practices.
