Article by Jim Finnan
IBM has launched two new cloud services to help enterprises further extend backup, archiving and recovery for mission critical data and related applications. IBM announced two new cloud services that will allow users to protect, and retrieve their most critical data in minutes (vs. days) in the worst-case situations.
The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services enable a corporation to protect their data and applications in a cost efficient, faster and more flexible way than they ever could before. Typical data center environments are not even close to this service according to IBM officials.
The SmartCloud offers corporations of all sizes a virtual and physical server recovery service, which continuously replicates the applications and the associated data on a secure cloud infrastructure. This, in turn, allows customers to have their business up and running within minutes after noticing an outage in their IT infrastructure.
IBM’s cloud services enable customers to securely manage and balance workloads, system downtime, and application downtime while simultaneously reducing data loss. Such services will help customers avoid expense by efficiently monitoring operational expenses and service levels. This, in turn, reduces the need for your IT Staff to be constantly involved.
With a greater need for companies to place data up to the cloud you will find an even greater need to store such data to the cloud longer and this will increase the need to retrieve such data with greater reliability and more frequency.
According to Rick Ruiz, GM of IBM’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Service: “Placing huge amounts of data to the cloud 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.”
IBM’s SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery is also included in IBM’s offering. This increases the reliability and efficiency of recovery to help eliminate business downtime, while minimizing data loss. According to IBM the services provides clients with an easy to use portal for remote access to rapidly bring back their business. It also eliminates issues of recovery on physical non-aligned hardware and travel to actual disaster sites.
The Second service offered by IBM is IBM SmartCloud Archive, which will meet a client’s stringent privacy and regulatory compliance needs. From features like advanced search and indexing and retrieval, to eDiscovery capabilities IBM feels this service to be one of the most advanced of its kind.
Other features of this service include advanced document and records management systems (dealing with structured and unstructured content), along with control functionality over data storage costs and business content issues according to various IBM officials.
The new services are being offered in addition to, and fully compliment IBM’s existing SmartCloud Managed Backup offering, which currently provides disaster recovery software enabling the above two services as cloud storage options. IBM offers many other cloud based services options, including IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery , which provides disaster recovery software that can be enabled as a cloud storage option.
These two new services will be available starting July 19th. They are a part of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio, including next generation, enterprise cloud technologies and services offerings for private, public and hybrid cloud based situations incorporating IBM hardware, software, services and best practices.
IBM is helping clients excel in cloud computing, providing secure and reliable Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions.
Cross-posted from CIOZone