IBM has announced new cloud services designed to enable clients to protect, store and retrieve their most critical data quickly after a disaster. The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services enable companies to protect their data and applications in a more efficient manner than with traditional disaster recovery centers, the vendor says.
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.
"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," says 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."
The new services include IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, intended to increase the reliability and efficiency of recovery. The service provides administrators with a portal for remote access to bring back their business on IBM's recovery infrastructure in case of outage, replicating both server software and associated data continuously. The solution is intended to reduce the issues of recovery on physical non-like hardware and travel to disaster sites.
The IBM SmartCloud Archive is also designed to meet privacy and regulatory compliance, from advanced search and indexing and retrieval, to e-discovery capabilities, the vendor says. The service provides clients with a document and records management system to deal with structured and unstructured content.
The new services complement IBM's existing SmartCloud Managed Backup offering, which has been in service for about 2 years. This service can be combined with the Archive and Virtualized services for storage, data protection and replication. Other cloud-based business continuity tools include the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery (6.2), which provides disaster recovery software that can be enabled as a cloud storage option.
The two new services will be available starting July 19 in certain markets, IBM says. For more information about IBM cloud solutions, visit www.ibm.com/smartcloud.