IBM Delivers Disaster Recovery, Security Services to SoftLayer Clients

ARMONK, NY, April 14, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is delivering SoftLayer clients a new set of cloud-capabilities and services that accelerate cloud adoption by securing vital company assets and maintaining continuous businesses operations, even in the event of a disaster. As a result, companies can quickly deploy innovative critical applications on a SoftLayer platform while ensuring that customer loyalty and the company reputation are maintained. SoftLayer is an IBM company.

As a cloud leader, IBM has helped more than 20,000 clients around the world transform their businesses. Now IBM is bringing those skills and support to the fast growing SoftLayer customer-base, providing the services needed to guarantee continuous businesses operations, prevent outages and quick recovery from disaster, and do so applying all the analytics and threat protection of IBM security services.

IBM Business Continuity and Resilience Services (BCRS) for SoftLayer

The overall market opportunity for business continuity/disaster recovery is expected to grow to almost $32 billion by 2015. As the industry leader for more than 50 years, IBM has been meeting commitments to clients during disasters such as Hurricane Sandy. Now through its cloud resilience portfolio, IBM delivers greater value by providing SoftLayer customers with increased resiliency in case of potential outages caused by issues such as human errors and cyber attacks.

With today's news, SoftLayer customers will initially have access to IBM's Cloud Virtualized Server Recovery (VSR) managed service, which offers sophisticated, low-cost automation that helps enterprises recover mission-critical applications, servers and cloud-based data in the event of an outage or disaster. With VSR, SoftLayer businesses will be able to replicate entire systems in real-time including system files, databases, applications and user data in a way that is independent of the make and model of the underlying hardware. The ability to respond quickly is essential with analysts estimating that every hour of downtime can cost a business upwards of tens of thousands of dollars.

IBM's Resiliency Consulting Services will also be extended to SoftLayer clients. These services, which integrate legacy IT environments with a private cloud and the SoftLayer platform, will help with resiliency assessment, planning and design, implementation and testing and more. These include Resiliency Consulting for Cloud, Cloud Managed Backup, Cloud Data Virtualization, Cloud Application Resiliency and Cloud Virtualized Server Recovery.

IBM will also be opening two new cloud based resiliency centers in Raleigh, North Carolina and Mumbai, India. These new facilities, which will join the 15 other global centers planned by SoftLayer and the 150 BCRS Resiliency Centers, will speed up recovery times by virtually eliminating network latency while allowing businesses to manage federal and local data residency compliance regulations.

In addition to these new services on SoftLayer, IBM also unveiled enhancements to its BCRS cloud-based resiliency offerings designed to help clients ensure their businesses, applications and IT infrastructures are stable and running around the clock. These include Cloud Managed Backup, Cloud Data Virtualization, Cloud Application Resiliency and Cloud Virtualized Server Recovery.

New IBM Managed Security Services for SoftLayer

According to IBM's 2013 Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) study, 70 percent of CISOs are concerned about cloud and mobile security and with good reason—sophisticated and targeted attacks are on the rise and according to reports, less than 2 percent of breaches are detected in the first 24 hours and less than 46 percent in the first 30 days¹.

With today's news, IBM complements SoftLayer's secure facilities and world class security infrastructure and processes with new managed security services. These new services deliver around-the-clock, unified threat management for firewall and intrusion detection and prevention management and monitoring services for SoftLayer customers. Now customers can benefit from IBM's security operations and intelligence analysts who will help identify threats, often before they are known by the world at large, track incidents and collect data, pinpoint potential vulnerabilities and in the end safeguard a business's operations. In addition to the cloud, these services capabilities can be integrated with on premise security equipment, which in the end enables customers to quickly obtain an integrated view of their overall Enterprise IT security.

Later this year, IBM will offer additional security services for SoftLayer customers including enhanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, Web and email protection, managed endpoint protection and more.

For detailed fact sheets on these services, please Click here.

To find out more about the benefits of a virtualized server recovery managed service, please visit the IBM Smarter Planet blog.

In addition to bringing these services to SoftLayer, IBM made two additional customer announcements today. First IBM and Novitex Enterprise Solutions today announced that they have signed an estimated $10-million agreement for IBM to provide cloud-based Infrastructure and Security services leveraging Softlayer's open, scalable and secure infrastructure to support Novitex's industry leading document outsourcing solutions. IBM also announced that Lava International Ltd (Lava), a leading Indian mobile handset company, has selected IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery (VSR) services to ensure continuous business operations, manage costs and improve overall resiliency.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM is the global leader in cloud with an unmatched portfolio of open cloud solutions that help clients build, rent or tap into cloud capabilities. No other company has the ability to bring together unique industry knowledge and unmatched cloud capabilities, that have already helped more than 20,000 clients around the world. Today, IBM has more than 100 cloud SaaS solutions, 37,000 experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of more than 25 global cloud delivery centers. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $6 billion in acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives. Most recently IBM acquired SoftLayer with more than 22,000 clients in 140 countries to further build out its IaaS portfolio with an easy and secure on ramp to cloud integrating IBM Cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

For more information about IBM Security Services, visit: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/security-services/

For more information about IBM business continuity and resiliency services, visit: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/business-continuity/

_{1.   Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report}

Contact information
Doug Fraim
IBM Global Media Relations
1-617-501-6376
[email protected] 

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SOURCE IBM