IBM has announced new smart 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, said a statement from the company.

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 statement added.

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 center environment, said a senior official.

“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,” remarked Rick Ruiz, general manager of IBM’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Services.

"This creates a need for business resilience strategy that will ensure continuous operation and create a competitive advantage to enable growth opportunities. Our cloud services bring flexibility, scalability, and rapid provisioning to help accomplish that,” he noted.

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, Ruiz stated.

According to him, IBM’s cloud allows clients to securely manage and balance workloads, lower application and system downtime, and reduce data loss.

The new services include:

*IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery – The server recovery tool increases the reliability and efficiency of recovery to help practically eliminate business downtime, and minimize data loss.

"This service 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," Ruiz explained.

*IBM SmartCloud Archive – Designed specifically to meet stringent privacy and regulatory compliance, from advanced search and indexing and retrieval, to eDiscovery capabilities.

It provides clients with an advanced document and records management system to deal with structured and unstructured content; control over rising data storage costs; and improved availability of critical business content, said the expert.

According to Ruiz, the new services complement IBM’s existing SmartCloud Managed Backup offering which has been used by hundreds of clients for the past two years.

The managed backup cloud provides flexible, automatic management and monitoring of backup and recovery processes, including hardware, software, installation and support, and can be delivered in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment.

These services help clients to avoid capital expense by more efficiently monitoring operational expenses and service levels, reducing the burden on IT staff, he added.

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, managing director, Information Technologies, 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," she added.-TradeArabia News Service