IBM has announced two new cloud services that enable users to protect, store and retrieve their most critical data in minutes -- versus days -- in the event of a disaster.

The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services enable customers to protect their data and applications faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner than they could before within a traditional data center environment, IBM officials said. The IBM SmartCloud offers companies of various sizes a virtual and physical server recovery service that continuously replicates their applications and all associated data on a secure cloud infrastructure. This enables them to have their business up and running in minutes after declaring an outage in their IT infrastructure. 

Moreover, IBM's cloud enables customers to securely manage and balance workloads, lower application and system downtime and reduce data loss. These services help clients avoid capital expense by more efficiently monitoring operational expenses and service levels, reducing the burden on IT staff.

"Now more than ever, companies are relying on a massive amount of data to run their businesses, storing it longer and retrieving it as needed," Rick Ruiz, general manager of IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, said in a statement. "This creates a need for a business resilience strategy that will ensure continuous operation and create a competitive advantage to enable growth opportunities. Our new cloud services bring flexibility, scalability and rapid provisioning to help accomplish that."

The new services include the IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, which increases the reliability and efficiency of recovery to help practically eliminate business downtime, and minimize data loss, IBM said. The service provides clients with an easy-to-use portal for remote access to rapidly bring back their business on IBM's recovery infrastructure in case of outage, replicating both server software and associated data continuously. And it eliminates the issues of recovery on physical non-like hardware and travel to disaster sites.

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