Tuesday, September 30, 2014
IBM opens new facility in response to growing need for disaster recovery
Max Burkhalter
The surging international data center market has created an equally large demand for business continuity and disaster recovery services. In fact, MarketsandMarkets expects the global cloud-based business continuity and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service sector to enjoy significant growth over the next few years. Forecasts expect the industry to experience a compounded annual growth rate of 55 percent, jumping from a $640 million industry in 2013 to a $5.8 billion industry by 2018. Much of this growth has been driven by the greater industry-wide adoption of the cloud, and virtualized platforms remain a key solution for business continuity challenges.
IBM expands the market
IBM has reacted to the growing demand for cloud-ready business continuity and disaster recovery solutions by expanding their own reach into the industry, according to the company website. ZDNet reports that the company has recently opened up a new resiliency center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. IBM promises that the state-of-the-art disaster recovery facility will help users to reduce their recovery times from a matter of days to a matter of minutes.
The new resiliency center will operate 24 hours a day and seven days a week, ensuring that always-on cloud customers enjoy up to the minute disaster recovery service. The facility's IT team is constantly monitoring potential threats to customer resiliency and will act immediately to ensure that disruptions to business continuity are kept to an absolute minimum. IBM has also opened up resilience centers across the globe to offer a similar service to overseas customers. The company's latest facilities are located in Turkey and India.
Potential barriers
Despite the growing interesting in DRaaS, there are still pertinent barriers preventing the trend from becoming the industry standard, according to AT&T Enterprise. Security issues, for example, have prevented several government agencies from fully adopting Data-Recovery-as-a-Service. Other businesses are hesitant to undertake the physical upgrades necessary to take full advantage of a cloud storage service, despite easy access to connectivity solutions like remote console servers. Some companies seek out hybrid solutions or utilize virtual machines as a testing environment before uploading the company's physical hard drive.
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