Even though a third of UK and US managers do not believe that Cloud is a suitable delivery model for disaster recovery services, IBM is steaming ahead with the introduction of two new ‘SmartCloud Resilience’ offerings.
The SmartCloud Virtualised Server Recovery service will provide customers with access to a portal that enables them to request spare server capacity at IBM’s data centres should an outage occur with their own machines.
The SmartCloud Archive service, on the other hand, comprises a document and records management system, which includes search, indexing, retrieval and eDiscovery capabilities.
Both services will become available as of 19 July and will be positioned as a complement to IBM’s existing SmartCloud Managed Backup offering, which automatically monitors and manages backup and recovery processes.
Rick Ruiz, general manager of IBM’s business continuity and resiliency services unit, said that, more than ever, companies were relying on massive amounts of data to run their businesses and were storing it for longer and retrieving it as needed. He added that this would create a need for a business resilience strategy that will ensure continuous operation and create a competitive advantage to enable growth opportunities - something that IBM's new cloud service would help to accomplish.
But a survey among 2,500 IT managers and C-Level executives in both the UK and US undertaken by high availability software provider Neverfail revealed that that as many as a third were wary of using cloud-based disaster recovery services.
Some 29.5% of US respondents and 31.3% of UK ones said they did not consider cloud platforms to be a viable option for DR. This compared with 44.2% of US managers and 30.9% of UK ones who felt it was feasible and the rest who were unsure.
Of those that felt cloud was not viable, 30% of US and 37.6% of UK respondents cited security concerns (34.2% US and 27.4% UK), lack of reliability (14.9% US and 16.9% UK) and cost (12.6% US and 20.4% UK).
