IBM Opens Cloud Resiliency Center in North Carolina

IBM announced the inauguration of a new cloud resiliency center designed to help organizations protect their services from disruptions.

Located at the Research Triangle Park (RTP) in Raleigh, North Carolina, the new center integrates cloud and traditional disaster recovery capabilities with innovative physical security features, IBM said.

Service disruptions can have a significant financial impact on a company. A recent study by the Ponemon Institute has shown that an outage lasting 1-2 hours costs an organization, on average, $32,000 per minute. In addition, long outages can negatively affect a company’s reputation and implicitly its future revenue. 

In the past, it took as much as 48 hours for an organization to get its services up and running again, but cloud resiliency services have reduced recovery times to minutes, IBM said.       

The team at IBM’s new resiliency center will monitor events 24/7 to ensure that customers’ data, applications and transactions are secured against the latest threats. The first company to take advantage of the center opened today in North Carolina is Monitise, a mobile banking and payments services provider that transfers $88 billion for its 30 million customers each year.

“Banking, paying and buying on mobile is becoming an increasingly integral and recognizable part of daily life – so for us as a Mobile Money provider, delivering a quality, always-on service is essential,” commented Adam Banks, EVP Technology at Monitise. “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 us that no matter the issue, our real-time service capabilities will not be impacted.”

“The work we’re doing with Monitise at this new cloud resiliency center is a strong testament to IBM partnerships with enterprise clients to drive new innovation,” said Mike Errity, Vice President, IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services. “By creating a new benchmark for delivering client continuity services in hybrid, public and private cloud environments, we meet the demands of businesses required to serve the around the clock needs of their clients.”

IBM has invested heavily in business continuity and disaster recovery solutions in recent years, and the company is not stopping here. Later this year, it plans on opening new resiliency centers in Turkey and India. According to IBM, the market is expected to grow to roughly $32 billion by 2015.

In June, the tech giant announced opening a new Security Operations Center in Costa Rica to address the increasing security requirements of customers in the region.