As the year comes to an end and the fourth quarter closes, it’s only natural to take stock of our achievements together. More importantly, it’s time to go beyond that. After all, “business as usual” is a cliché for a reason—in my endless travels around the globe, I’m hearing that you, our IBM Business Partners, are just as excited as IBM about joining us on our journey into the Cognitive Era, where Watson and solutions based on Watson have begun to represent the future of meeting client demand.

In case you hadn’t heard, ransomware is big, big business. In 2016 alone, ransomware payouts are closing in on the billion-dollar mark, with a whopping 70% of companies reporting that they paid to have their maliciously-encrypted data liberated after being hit.

Data backup and recovery for enterprises has become a hot topic in the IT industry as mobile devices (including laptops, smartphones, iPads and tablets) have become essential to the workplace. Cloud technology such as file syncing, sharing and online productivity suites enable organizations to access data, communicate and conduct business everywhere and on every device.

IBM first launched Bluemix, its cloud platform, in February 2014 as the future of IBM Cloud. It became a game changer, bringing together market-leading capabilities from across IBM and our third-party ecosystem to help enterprises, developers and startups build, run and manage applications in the cloud.

The new Data Protection Trends: Validating Recovery report conducted by Asigra demystifies the notion that organizations recover 100 per cent.