IBM Pours $300 million Into Building Disaster Recovery Centers

To ensure data security for its business and government clients, IBM has added another layer -- or in this case, brick -- and plans on spending $300 million to construct 13 business resilience service delivery centers in 10 countries this year.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based company said that the massive infrastructure expansion is the largest of its kind and will allow its clients to access business continuity services for the first time from a cloud computing environment.

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.

The business resilience service delivery centers will be located in: 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.

Additionally, IBM Wednesday ramped up the build-out of its Information Protection Services (IPS) business, which delivers cloud-based computing services that support business continuity. IPS combines IBM hardware with storage management software in a fully configured, rack-mounted storage appliance. This is also known as a data protection "vault," capable of storing multi-terabytes of information and application data.

Clients can use the service delivery platform for cloud computing capabilities by storing 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 can immediately recover it by restoring and retrieving it from a center directly to the client's business or to an alternative worksite recovery area in case of a disaster.

The vaults have integrated technology from Arsenal Digital Solutions, a data protection provider that IBM acquired earlier this year. The on-demand service delivery platform provides global scalability of information protection services and rapid time-to-protection of customer data.