<p>IBM today announced a $1.2 billion investment to build 15 datacenters worldwide for its enterprise cloud business. It's IBM's second $1 billion-plus cloud investment of the new year.</p><p>IBM, which lags far behind Amazon in cloud revenue, is looking to differentiate itself by offering enterprise-grade cloud services. With the 15 new datacenters going online, IBM will have 40 around the world, compared with just a few big datacenters each for Amazon and other competitors, IBM SmartCloud vice president Dennis Quan told us.</p><p>The distributed datacenters and dedicated connections mean that IBM's datacenters will be more reliable than those operated by its competitors, he said.One of the big challenges of running enterprise applications in the cloud is providing reliable, resilient infrastructure that can span the globe. One of the benefits of having datacenters in increasing numbers of countries is that when you're building out an enterprise application that has a global user base, you can put your infrastructure in multiple datacenters. In this case, 40. What that means is your application becomes more resilient to situations that might arise in one or more datacenters over time.</p><p>IBM's architecture provides a high-performance, low-latency private secure network for cross-border transactions or real-time backup, Quan said. Amazon and other competitors rely on traffic going over the global Internet, which raises performance concerns and security issues.</p><p><a href="http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=758&doc_id=271088&f_src=internetevolution_gnews">Keep reading...</a></p>