IBM's India Research Laboratory has developed <A HREF="http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/20/IBM-disaster-management-tool_1.html">the Resiliency Maturity Index,</A> a framework that quantitatively assesses the ability of an organization to recover from a variety of disasters such as floods, power outages, software glitches, epidemics, and terrorist attacks.

The software tool, which IBM has used to assess the ability of its own global services delivery operations in India and Brazil to withstand disasters, also assists in telling organizations where they can best spend more money to improve their ability to cope with disasters, Guruduth Banavar, associate director at the Bangalore center of IBM India Research Laboratory, said Thursday.