The industry’s leading cloud providers are all investing heavily in security to make their platforms more appealing for risk-averse enterprises. Today, IBM Corp. is upping the ante by adding a new object storage option to its infrastructure-as-a-service portfolio that is specifically designed with data privacy in mind.

Its most important component is the patented SecureSlice technology that Big Blue obtained through the acquisition of Cleversafe Inc. last October. When an organization uploads a new dataset to its IBM Cloud Object Storage deployment, the records are automatically encrypted and broken up into small shards that are then spread them out across multiple locations. Customers have a choice between dispersing the pieces among multiple facilities in a single geographic area or sending them to three separate regions for extra measure.

Should one of the data centers become unavailable, the service can quickly recover the information from the remaining shards in the other locations. And IBM says that the underlying SecureSlice mechanism is even able to protect deployments against “catastrophic” outages like hurricane-induced power cuts if it’s set to the cross-region mode. What truly sets the technology apart, however, is that it only allows shards to be reassembled at customer sites. As a result, the service can protect organizations against the possibility of an attacker somehow compromising its cloud environments and gaining access to the information inside.

Rounding out the feature set is integration with IBM’s Spectrum Virtualize storage virtualization software, which enables customers to upload data to its cloud directly from their on-premise arrays. The offering supports more 400 different storage systems according to today’s launch announcement. And in the same release, Big Blue boasts that its new object service is already been used by Bitly Inc. to store information about user activity and traffic trends. The link shortening provider plans on moving about 500 terabytes of internal data to the company’s platform as part of their agreement.

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