IBM, a leading cloud platform and cognitive solutions company, has announced that it is using the power of Hybrid Cloud, AI, and IBM Services to offer clients capabilities that help them prepare for, and recover from, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and more.

According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute. That is around $300,000 per hour. It takes an average of 23 minutes for employees to refocus after an e-mail server glitch, valuable time that can negatively impact business results. These are costs and down time organizations and consumers simply can’t afford.

In order to help clients turn data into valuable information to combat disruptions resulting from extreme weather – as well as from cyber threats and other crises – IBM offers a series of services to support hybrid cloud and AI capabilities, including:

• IBM services like Cloud Resiliency Orchestration and Disaster Recovery as a Service, which help clients manage end-to end recovery in a hybrid cloud environment, respond to outages more efficiently, and automate much of the disaster recovery process to reallocate valuable time and expertise to tackle other critical pain points.
• Data from The Weather Company to help track and predict potential outages.
• IBM’s Risk Insights Tool, which leverages Weather.com APIs and social media data to predict weather with precision and determine if clients are in the path of a natural disaster.
• Watson-based tools that help create more accurate predictive modelling for how a storm’s path will impact each client’s assets. These tools are able to help assess scenarios and the impact the natural disaster will have on the client assets and the risk associated with it.

Islam Soliman, regional leader, IBM Services, Middle East and Pakistan, said: “Natural disasters are inevitable. However, their adverse impact can be mitigated by preventive measures.”

“Through IBM’s global network of Resiliency Services Centers across six continents, we are able to help clients combat disruptions resulting from extreme weather, cyber threats and other crises and salvage their data quickly and securely,” Soliman added.

IBM Services’ Resiliency Centers, located across six continents, are helping thousands of clients prepare for the next wave of hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, as well as malicious cyber threats and other disasters. In recent years, IBM teams have faced all kinds of risk scenarios, including:

• When a nuclear power company located near a coastline was looking to build a disaster recovery facility, it decided to pick a location that was much further inland to avoid the effects of coastal storms. While this separation worked well for many years, one recent super storm produced torrential rain hundreds of miles inland, causing a nearby river to swell and completely flood the facility. Company personnel removed disk drives and data media in an attempt to fly them out to another company location, but no planes could use the flooded air fields. What was supposed to be a secure location became a sitting duck. After the storm, the company vowed to rethink their physical and digital resilience, and called in IBM to use our technology to help them reinforce their facility against future storms.

Spanning over 5 million sq ft globally, IBM Resiliency Centers house a vast array of experts – data scientists, researchers, weather experts, technical architects and more – leveraging cloud and AI capabilities with Watson and The Weather Company to answer the call in a crisis and recover critical data in minutes, helping clients make better decisions, save millions, prevent disruption, and preserve their brand for the long term, it stated. – TradeArabia News Service