IBM wants to keep customers up and running no matter what

From a business continuity perspective it doesn’t really matter whether an outage or incident is the result of a fire, flood, earthquake, cyber-attack, or just simple human error. Where the proverbial rubber meets the road, all that matters is that business carry on as smoothly as possible. IBM is leveraging the power of the cloud to raise the bar for business continuity with the launch of its new cloud resiliency center.

Down time costs money. I once worked as a consultant for a Fortune 100 manufacturer that invested heavily in redundant systems in an attempt to eliminate virtually every single point of failure imaginable. From an outside perspective, it seemed as if the company was “wasting” money guarding against potential incidents with only infinitesimal odds of ever happening. From the company’s perspective, though, it stood to lose millions of dollars per hour if plant productivity was halted.

Most companies aren’t Fortune 100 manufacturers, and most companies won’t lose millions of dollars per hour during an outage—but down time still costs money for any company. A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute found that a substantial outage—one lasting more than an hour or two—costs a company more than $32,000 a minute on average. Outages are also reported across social media, and the longer an outage lasts the more damaging it can be for the reputation of the company or brand—with lasting consequences that can impact long-term revenue.

That’s why disaster recovery and business continuity are strategic imperatives. The new IBM Cloud Resiliency Center takes business continuity to the cloud, and promises to reduce recovery times that often take 24 to 48 hours down to mere minutes. The Center is open 24/7/365, and staffed with a dedicated resiliency center team that monitors developing disaster events, and takes action to ensure that business continues with minimal interruption.

An IBM spokesperson shared, “This new center represents IBM’s largest in the US, and is already drawing the attention of companies such as Monitise, a world leader in mobile money. With more than 28 million users and 3.4 billion annual mobile transactions, IBM is managing Monitise’s private cloud infrastructure and establishing a resilient and highly flexible architecture that allows it to deliver uninterrupted service to its clients.”

“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,” said 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.”

IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS) has been helping clients with business continuity and disaster recovery for more than 50 years. With the new cloud resiliency center, IBM is positioning itself to remain a leader in a market that is expected to grow to $32 billion by 2015.

The IBM Cloud Resiliency Center is hosted at IBM’s Research Triangle Park facilities in North Carolina. IBM is also planning to open two additional cloud resiliency centers in Mumbai, India, and Izmir, Turkey. The global network of resources will virtually eliminate network latency and speed up recovery times, while also allowing businesses to respect and comply with federal, and local data residency regulations.

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM’s Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.