IBM today announced that it is spending $300 million to expand its business continuity and disaster recovery business, adding 13 facilities around the world to address what it described as a surge in demand from businesses and governments.
The company said the investment is the largest of its kind in IBM's 40-year history in the business continuity and resiliency industry.
Stan Clanton, vice president of infrastructure at InfoUSA Services Group, said he's excited about the prospects of IBM expanding its overseas business continuity and resiliency services.
"Part of our direction is to expand internationally," he said. "The value of having an international partner will make it more convenient for me to deal with potential recoveries internationally."
InfoUSA is a $750 million direct-mail services and consumer database information company in Omaha. Clanton said he uses only IBM's recovery service for his mainframe environment and has an internal recovery architecture for InfoUSA's 1,400 servers and various storage arrays.
IBM said it will build new "Business Resilience Centers" in cities including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, London, Warsaw and New York, as well as Izmir, Turkey; Milan, Italy; and Cologne, Germany. They will open this year and will house IBM's latest remote data management and information-protection capabilities, including the storage, replication and recovery of data and business applications for the first time from a cloud-computing-based environment.
In addition, IBM said it is accelerating the build-out of its Information Protection Services business to deliver cloud-based computing services to support business continuity. Those services use technology gained from IBM's acquisition of Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc. earlier this year and combine IBM hardware with storage management software in a fully configured, rack-mounted storage appliance known as a data-protection "vault."
IBM has more than 150 business-resilience centers worldwide.
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