Availability zones are isolated clouds located within a data centre region with independent power, cooling and networking to help strengthen fault tolerance. Though IBM Cloud already operates in 60 locations, the company will now have even more capacity and capability in these critical centres.

IBM Cloud's 18 new availability zones will be located in high demand centres in Europe (Germany and UK), Asia-Pacific (Tokyo and Sydney) and North America (Washington, DC and Dallas).

It has also announced that it has got ExxonMobile, Bausch + Lomb and Westpac onboard and they will be migrating their central workloads to the IBM Cloud.

Senior Vice President, IBM Watson & Cloud Platform, David Kenny said: “The world’s biggest companies work with IBM to migrate them to the cloud because we know their technology and unique business needs as they bridge their past with the future. Our continued cloud investment and growing client roster reflect that companies are increasingly seeking hybrid cloud environments that offer cutting-edge tools including AI, analytics, IoT and blockchain to maximise their benefits.”

IBM customers can deploy multi-zone container clusters across these availability zones using IBM Cloud's Kubernetes Service to simplify how they deploy and manage containerised applications.