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Businesses using IBM computers will receive extra support from the hardware manufacturer after it announced the investment of $300 million (£161 million) in disaster recovery.

Technology news resource vnunet.com reported that IBM has submitted plans to build 13 new facilities across the globe called Business Resilience Centres (BRCs), including locations such as London, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Paris.

Speaking to the news provider, Philippe Jarre, general manager of IBM's global business continuity and resiliency services, said that the demand for business continuity from customers was growing.

He continued: "The ultimate objective is for our customers to have no downtime and there are two approaches: prevent and react. All our centres are built to react."

It was added that IBM also planned to create systems that can detect when firms need to switch operations to a BRC in response to the threat of data loss.

At the beginning of the month, IBM announced that it would be spending $360 million on cloud computing centres in North Carolina and Tokyo.

A recent survey for Connect found that one in ten companies has lost important data as a result of a backup failure. The company has now developed a unique online backup service - http://www.connect.co.uk/services/online_backup – for SMEs to ensure they can survive any disaster