London, UK: 12 October 2009: SunGard Availability Services today launched SunGard-as-a-Service, its fully managed ‘private cloud’ service in the UK. SunGard-as-a-Service draws on SunGard Availability Services’ 30 year heritage in Information Availability, IT managed services, and experience working with 10,000 customers worldwide.
SunGard Availability Services’ private cloud service consists of five components: connectivity; security; load balancing; computing power; and managed tiered storage. Each of these components is scalable within an overall solution, meaning that organisations have the choice and flexibility to adapt their private cloud to their specific requirements.
SunGard Availability Services also announced that its enterprise-class infrastructure will be used by SunGard Financial Systems to provide a secure, reliable platform for its Software-as-a-Service offerings for its customers in the finance sector.
The new offering provides organisations with peace of mind to move their IT operations into ‘the cloud’. Delivered on a shared infrastructure operating across its network of highly resilient UK technology centres, SunGard-as-a-Service offers a fully managed enterprise IT infrastructure solution which places an emphasis on resilience and security – both physical and virtual. The offering provides organisations of all sizes with the benefits of cloud computing coupled with greater flexibility, choice and the ability to scale up in line with customers’ requirements. Moreover, organisations can access SunGard’s proven consultancy expertise to ascertain the appropriate private cloud solution for each application.
SunGard-as-a-Service helps CIOs achieve more with their IT budgets, by helping minimise capital expenditure on IT projects, funding them instead on an operational expenditure basis. All systems are managed by teams of specialist engineers who man the facilities on a 24/7 basis to help ensure systems function at optimum levels. This approach allows CIOs to keep their own teams focused on the processes and applications the organisation manages itself with no dilution of resources.
Bob Tarzey, analyst and director, Quocirca, added: “Cloud computing is proving of interest to organisations of all sizes looking for high quality, flexible server and storage capacity. To meet this demand, providers of cloud services need to ensure that their offerings are scalable, easy to implement, readily accessible and, of course, secure. Those providers that achieve this will help their customers attain the ultimate goal of highly available computing resources at a cost, which is hard to achieve in-house and can be funded out of operating expenditure.”
Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services, said: “We can help our customers put the right cloud strategy in place, selecting which applications should be put into the cloud and which should remain in-house, and then provide them with a robust and secure managed IT infrastructure. We’ve been protecting and managing data for the world’s largest organisations for the past 30 years, and businesses can rely on us to help them make the transition to cloud computing.”
“Cloud computing should offer solutions to every organisation. The model offers manifold benefits – zero capital expenditure and high flexibility among them – yet CIOs continue to voice concerns over the levels of resilience, data protection and security the cloud can offer. The private cloud technology underpinning SunGard-as-a-Service addresses these concerns directly,” Tilley continued.
Mats Lillienberg, chief technology officer of SunGard Financial Systems, said: “We recognised that in order to offer true cloud-based Software-as-a-Service solutions to our blue chip customers, we needed to assure them that we have the secure cloud infrastructure in place to protect their data at all times. Now, with SunGard Availability Services’ network of highly resilient data centres, we are able to offer fully scalable, high performance computing, managed by experienced and highly skilled engineers.”