New IBM Services Target Security And Disaster Recovery

International Business Machines, IBM, has recently decided to focus on disaster recovery and security services. IBM just bought the company SoftLayer to expand on its cloud offerings. IBM' Cloud Virtualized Server Recovery (VSR) is designed to keep the most crucial applications and information for firms in the SoftLayer cloud. IBM has also developed a service that is geared towards non-SoftLayer customers. IBM released several general cloud recovery services such as Cloud Managed Backup, Cloud Data Virtualization, Cloud Application Resilliency, and Cloyd Virtualized Server Recovery. IBM also released consulting services related to disaster recovery. IBM offers Resiliency Consulting Services for SoftLayer customers. This service will help customers assess, plan, and management the disaster recovery process. On top of their announcement of the new services, IBM also announced two new data centers located at Raleigh, North Carolina and Mumbai India.

I think this is a great move for IBM. They are really looking to the future for what firms will need. Downtime of servers is indeed very expensive. Taking advantage of this aspect, IBM hopes to attract many firms to subscribe to their disaster recovery service. I think this is a very good project for IBM. Data has always been invaluable to firms. Offering very flexible and appealing disaster recovery systems will become an advantage for IBM. Despite the prevalence of the cloud, many are still concerned about its security. This is one great challenge for IBM. IBM needs to convince its customers that the cloud will be secure enough in order to get them to subscribe to these services. As a solution, IBM developed new security tools that will enable companies’ IT personnel to able to access their data from the cloud in the same way that they are able to in their own database centers. I think this is a great solution to this aspect of cloud security. People always want to have control. Giving the firms the same control and access to their data is definitely an attractive feature of IBM’s services. I believe security is not only the customer’s concern. It should be provides’ responsibility.

Because security is very critical in today’s world of technology, there will always be people who will be skeptical of alternative ways of storing data such as the cloud. The concerns of firms about the cloud are legitimate concerns. There are always flaws and security issues that are being discovered. However there are ways that can resolve these problems. Even though there are many security issues and flaws being discovered, I am positive that security will improve. I believe that security will constantly improve as it is always being challenged. Companies such as IBM are clever to address these concerns before any major issues come up. IBM not developing a preventive measure for security could negatively impact their firm. IBM could lose the trust of their customers if a major security issue arises and IBM has no idea how to resolve it or was unable to prevent it from occurring in the first place.