<p>IBM sees big opportunity in delivering cloud storage services to big enterprises and Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs).</p><p>To that end, it's investing $1.2 billion to boost its cloud storage services. And as of February 4, IBM is announcing a partnership to deliver a cloud storage service with Waltham, Mass.-based Actifio, a fast-growing provider of so-called copy data management technology that boosts data storage efficiency for enterprises and SMBs.</p><p>The problem is easy to understand but hard to solve. Companies traditionally make separate copies of their critical data for each purpose. They make different copies of their corporate data for various purposes such as application development, testing, analytics, and data retrieval.</p><p>And as the amount of data that companies store increases every day, the cost of maintaining all these distinct copies escalates. CFOs are increasingly demanding that IT executives find a way to rein in these costs.</p><p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2014/02/04/ibm-partners-with-actifio-to-target-100-billion-cloud-market/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ibm-and-actifio-add-powerful-new-data-virtualization-solutions-to-ibm-cloud-portfolio-2014-02-04?reflink=MW_news_stmp">IBM and Actifio Add Powerful New Data Virtualization Solutions To IBM Cloud ...</a> (MarketWatch)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dRvJtQFjrppLVSMzRwZ58fkRaNWPM&authuser=0&ned=us">4 additional articles.</a></p>