IBM last week announced plans to launch three business continuity and resiliency services products in Singapore later this year.

The announcement was made in conjunction with IBM's participation at the World Continuity Congress in Singapore, held last week.

Business continuity, which incorporates disaster recovery, refers to products and processes which allow an organisation to continue functioning during and after a disaster.

Charles Largay, executive of global crisis management team, IBM Global Technology Services, said in an interview with BizIT: 'In today's interconnected world, virtually every aspect of a company's operations is vulnerable to disruption (and) continuity has become a concern that extends far beyond IT.'

In Singapore, IBM has more than 20 core employees at its primary disaster recovery centre, Mr Largay noted. 'Overall, IBM Singapore has the ability to deploy more than 500 engineers and technical expertise from IBM Global Technology Services during a major situation,' he said, adding that 'as demand from clients increase, more headcount could be added.'

While declining to disclose names of specific IBM customers for these services, Mr Largay said the company sees a 'growing demand for business continuity and resiliency services among our clients from across all business sectors, and particularly from the finance and banking and government sectors'.

IBM's Global Crisis Management services portfolio will be delivered by local organisations.

The official added that the need for local skilled professionals to plan, deploy and deliver these services is a definite requirement.

'These new services were built for the global marketplace with input from around the world, but disasters are local, so the support too must be local, but backed up by the value of the support of IBM Global Services, with its support in the form of training, on-going development and of course investment in research,' Mr Largay said.

One of the three new services is what is called the Emergency Response Networks (ERN) solution. According to the IBM official, the solution was developed to address 'the reality that the world is a networked place and for businesses and organisations to rapidly recover from any event, the restoration of voice, data and video communications is critical'.

The rapid restoration of network services is important because actions or decisions made without accurate and timely information can make things worse, rather than better, he added.

The second solution is the Virtual Workplace Continuity Service which, Mr Largay said, fills a critical gap in dealing with personnel issues in times of crisis.

'Reaching an organisation's most critical assets, its people, providing alerts and timely status information of a crisis event are key factors in rapid recovery during any crisis.'

The third service is Electronic Data Management (EDM). This is another key solution that addresses an area often ignored or if addressed at all not comprehensively, Mr Largay said.

'EDM addresses the data and information that individuals, not enterprises or organisations, depend on to effectively perform their jobs.'

These three solutions 'are focused on enabling the workforce and the most critical assets of organisations with the capability to return to normal processes as soon as possible and in a cost effective manner'.

Mr Largay noted that all of IBM's business continuity and disaster recovery services are developed for use by businesses of all sizes, from small organisations to the largest global enterprises. 'Small and medium-sized enterprises in many cases may be at greater risk compared to large organisations, if they have not done the planning, preparation and deployment of affordable tools to respond to crisis situations. Uptime is critical and interruptions to service could mean loss of major revenue as well as negative impact on credibility and company branding.'

IBM has five disaster recovery sites here, which are located in the east and west of Singapore. The first site was established more than 10 years ago.

The sites are equipped with data centre infrastructure with redundancy and one primary site is equipped with move-in condition work suites to enable business continuity for our clients, Mr Largay said.

The three solutions will be available across IBM's Asean and South Asia region in the third quarter of this year.

They will be launched first in Singapore, followed by Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

This article first appeared in BT on April 23, 2007