The technology giant says it will be building the facilities in 10 countries, including China, Japan, Turkey, Poland, France and the US.

According to reports on Data Center Knowledge, the new initiative is described as "a cloud computing solution for disaster recovery and business continuity, providing backups of data on servers which can then be quickly accessed to rapidly restore lost files."

Disaster recovery is a service the technology giant currently offers, but has so far only rolled out the cloud computing data recovery technology to fewer than five of its existing 154 data centers.

In an interview with the New York Times, Philippe Jarre, the general manager of IBM's business continuity and resiliency services unit, said there has been a large increase in demand for disaster recovery services in the last 18 months and his unit is the fastest-growing business in IBM's big services division.

Disaster recovery and business continuity services seem to be an interesting and sensible application of cloud computing technologies and although IBM is laying down the groundwork with a rather fresh approach, there are certainly other companies developing presumably competitive offerings.

In June, data center operator and hosting provider Terremark announced it was building disaster recovery services into its enterprise cloud computing offering in the coming months.

And in March utility computing platform developer 3Tera inked a deal with cloud storage platform provider Nirvanix to develop new cloud computing solutions including remote backup capabilities for Web application developers.

Over the last three years, IBM says it has dedicated more than 200 full-time researchers and over $100 million in cloud computing research and development. IBM launched its version of cloud computing "Blue Cloud" in November 2007 and in August unveiled its ninth cloud computer center in Tokyo.