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Five months after its December 2007 purchase of Arsenal Digital Solutions, IBM is starting to integrate the company's second-generation cloud computing technology into its own large product portfolio. On April 28, 2008, IBM officials also announced that they are increasing their Express Advantage Portfolio for midsize businesses to include a new set of information protection services, which signifies IBM's first move into on-demand data protection, according to Information Protection Services executive Brian Reagan. Cloud storage is a model of networked data storage in which data is not stored on dedicated servers but instead is stored on various virtual servers that are generally hosted by third parties. The new IBM services are E-Mail Management Express, an online service based on Arsenal's product, and Remote Data Protection Express, a scaled-down version of IBM's premium enterprise data protection package. Reagan explained that these are tailored for the midsize business that has perhaps two or three Windows servers and a smaller-footprint data center. According to Reagan, Remote Data Protection Express is a high-security, automatic off-site data backup and recovery service for Windows servers and PCs, while E-mail Management Express allows users to choose from a newly expanded portfolio, including e-mail archiving and e-mail continuity, that can be combined to assist in supporting diverse e-mail management needs hosted by IBM.
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