IBM has opened the doors of a huge 4,000,000 sq ft facility it calls a ‘cloud resiliency center’ in North Carolina at its Research Triangle Park (RTP) campus.

The facility, which includes data center space, also has the ability to act as a disaster recovery site and will provide services for IBM’s SoftLayer cloud customers. The first company to move into the RTP facility is UK-based mobile banking firm Monitise.

The RTP facility represents IBM’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Service’s (BCRS) largest single-site investment in the US. The site adds to IBM’s more than 150 resiliency centers across 50 countries and employs 7,500 people, mostly from North Carolina.

The facility provides 72,000 sq ft of raised-floor data center space and is connected to the dedicated BCRS backbone.

Connectivity services at the site are provided by AT&T, Time Warner Telecom, Level 3 and Verizon Business.

According to Triangle Business Journal, IBM has plans to open two new cloud based resiliency centers in Mumbai, India and Izmir, Turkey.

Mike Errity, IBM’s vice president of business continuity and resiliency services, said: “As we all know, we operate in an 'always on' world. Our clients require their systems, data, information and networks to always be available and, in the event something occurs that disrupts their mission critical business processes, we help them move from one location to our location.”

Adam Banks, Monitise  executive vice president of technology, said: "As we expand globally, this partnership with IBM allows us to provide a consistent, reliable customer service while having in place a proven cloud resiliency plan that ensures that no matter the issue, our real-time service capabilities will not be impacted."