IBM has announced it is investing US$300 million to construct 13 Business Resilience service delivery centers in 10 countries in 2008, increasing its ability to address surging demand from businesses and governments from around the world seeking to keep their operations safe from disruption. The massive infrastructure expansion is the largest of its kind and will permit IBM clients to access services that support business continuity for the first time from a cloud computing environment.
Future Business Resilience service delivery centers will be located in every geographic region of the globe, with sites including Hong Kong; Tokyo, Japan; Paris, France; London, UK; Beijing and Shanghai, China; Izmir, Turkey; Warsaw, Poland; Milan, Italy; Metro Park, New Jersey; Cologne, Germany; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Mumbai, India; South Africa; and Brussels, Belgium. The centers are specifically designed to help clients maintain business operations under virtually any condition, comply with industry and government regulations and recover rapidly from disasters.
IBM is also accelerating the build-out of its Information Protection Services business to deliver cloud-based computing services to support business continuity. Services from IBM Information Protection Services combine IBM hardware with storage management software in a fully configured, rack-mounted storage appliance, known as a data protection "vault" that is capable of storing multi-terabytes of information and applications data. The vaults are integrated with technology gained via IBM's acquisition of Arsenal Digital Solutions in 2008. The patent-pending on-demand service delivery platform enables global scalability of information protection services and rapid time-to-protection of customer data.
Using the service delivery platform, clients will be able to take advantage of cloud computing capabilities by storing their business data in IBM's data protection vaults that will be based in IBM's global business resiliency centers. Once the information is protected, customers will be able to immediately recover that information by restoring and retrieving it from a center directly to the client's business or to an alternative worksite recovery area in the event of a disaster.
The acquisition of Arsenal and the accelerated deployment of its data protection vaults globally will help IBM offer clients sophisticated remote data management and business continuity capabilities, like storing, replicating and recovering key data and business applications through an IBM business resiliency center."