IBM announced on Thursday a new cloud object storage service which builds on its acquisition of Cleversafe, a developer of object-based storage software and appliances that it closed last year in November 2015.

Specifically, the IBM Cloud Object Storage storage-as-a-service offering is based on SecureSlice technology, which IBM said combines encryption and erasure coding for greater security and data availability.

It is available now for enterprise clients across IBM cloud data centers in the US and Europe, with availability in APAC starting in December.

IBM said the offerings will help clients scale large unstructured data volumes across on-premises systems, and public and private clouds. Hybrid clouds are helping companies gain a competitive advantage, according to a recent report by IBM.

“As clients continue to move massive workloads to hybrid clouds there is a need for an easier, more secure and economical way to store and manage mounting volumes of digital information,” Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud said in a statement. “With today’s announcement, IBM becomes the leading cloud vendor to provide clients the flexibility and availability of object data storage across on-premises and public clouds.”

One of the marquee clients of the new IBM cloud storage service is Bitly, which has adopted the service to “more quickly and easily analyze historical data that is being produced by the more than 10 billion clicks it processes each month across the world,” according to the press release. The company has also signed a multi-year agreement with IBM, with IBM Cloud becoming its exclusive cloud platform.

“With more than 400 million new links created every month, the Bitly platform is growing at an explosive rate,” said Robert Platzer, CTO, Bitly. “We turned exclusively to IBM Cloud because of its leadership in data services. Through this partnership IBM will help us transform our business and build a variety of new cloud services – from advanced analytics and data mining to data research – into our software platform. The new IBM Cloud Object Storage service will enable us to manage all the data from our on-premises and cloud infrastructure with ease and flexibility.”