IBM to Deliver New Cloud Services to SoftLayer Clients 

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.

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.

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'sCloud 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.

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 reasonsophisticated 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 days.

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.