From IBM:

IBM Extends Cloud Computing Patent and Innovation Leadership

IBM Inventors Have Received More Than 400 Cloud Patents in 2015

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Armonk, N.Y. - 31 Jul 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that its inventors have received more than 400 new cloud patents in 2015. Furthermore, over the last 18 months, IBM has secured nearly 1,200 cloud patents, bolstering the company’s ability to deliver innovative new cloud services, solutions and capabilities to clients across all industries.

These new IBM cloud patents comprise a wide range of innovations, including enhancing and improving the speed of deployment and security of cloud data centers, as well as easing the management of cloud applications, storage and maintenance. The following are examples:

• U.S. Patent #9,015,164: High availability for cloud server - A key attribute of a cloud computing environment is high availability. Aspects of the disclosed invention enable a cloud environment to take snapshots of virtual machines, which can then be used for recovery purposes.
• U.S. Patent #8,949,415: Activity-based virtual machine availability in a networked computing environment - Aspects of the invention conserve network bandwidth used by a cloud resource, such as a virtual machine (VM), in response to a volume of high priority network traffic specifically designated for the VM falling below a threshold. Conserving network bandwidth may be accomplished by performing a network traffic disablement action with respect to network traffic to and from the VM, without disabling the VM. This can help to reduce costs charged by a cloud service provider for the amount of data transferred over a network to and from the VM.
• U.S. Patent #8,984,132: System and method for supporting secure application deployment in a cloud - When a software application is set up to run in a cloud computing environment, appropriately handling sensitive data is an important requirement. Aspects of the disclosed invention identify aspects of a software application that use secure data, and deploy the secured data to one or more secure servers. Non-secure data may be deployed to one or more publicly available cloud servers. Communication between the secure servers and publicly available servers may be managed using secure connections.
• U.S. Patent #8,984,134: Unified cloud computing infrastructure to manage and deploy physical and virtual environments - In cloud computing environments, physical and virtual environments must be managed and deployed across multiple, heterogeneous hardware platforms, which can cause substantial complexity. Aspects of the disclosed invention provide for using a single unit that contains the hardware and software components to build a cloud computing environment.
• U.S. Patent #8,990,950: Enabling granular discretionary access control for data stored in a cloud computing environment - Cloud-based storage services allow organizations to increase data accessibility among geographically-separated groups, but that can come at the risk of data being compromised. Aspects of the disclosed invention enable discretionary data access control to allow the owner of the data to exert greater control.

As part of IBM’s objective to continue to innovate and lead in cloud, the company has forged strategic partnerships in the last 12 months with Box and Apple that leverage IBM cloud services.

For 22 consecutive years, IBM has topped the list of U.S. patent recipients. The company’s invention and patent leadership is illustrated at http://ibm.co/1wPWUg0.