IBM earned a record 6,478 U.S. patents in 2012, marking the 20th straight year that it racked up more innovations than any other company. Big Blue is bent on extending this streak for another year, and is just as keen on gaining a Big Data foothold in the cloud.

Inching ever closer to its goals, IBM announced that it has patented a technique for uncovering insights from on- and off-premise information silos. The method, covered by U.S. Patent #8,504,400: Dynamically Optimized Distributed Cloud Computing-based Business Process Management (BPM) System, facilitates the collection and integration of data from traditional on-premise systems and the cloud.

With the Internet of Things driving exponential growth in data volumes, organizations are under increased pressure to look beyond the firewall for new revenue streams and business value. IBM’s patent could significantly simplify this task by accelerating and reducing the overhead associated with collecting social media interactions, sensory data and other information from outside sources.

Earlier this month, IBM and Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York unveiled a business continuity solution that lets admins rapidly move VMs and data to remote locations with the push of a button. Geared towards software-defined networks, the open source system is designed to improve service levels and minimize downtime during natural disasters or other emergencies.

The platform is currently being tested in three IBM-powered data centers connected over a 125-kilometer optical metropolitan network built with technology from partner Adva Optical Networking. The environment was put together as part of a research program run by Marist College in cooperation with City University of New York (CUNY), State University of New York (SUNY) and Columbia University.