Highly Flexible Infrastructure as a Service Offering Built Upon
World-class Availability and Resilience
London, 14th July, 2011, SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability, cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and business continuity services, announced the launch of its enterprise-class shared cloud in Europe. Built on the same principles as SunGard’s successful private cloud, the new shared environment provides customers with a cost-effective and flexible way of accessing cloud services on SunGard’s highly resilient infrastructure, with the ability to quickly and significantly scale resources.
In shared cloud offerings there is a concern that if several customers’ usage rapidly increases then overall performance can suffer. SunGard’s enterprise-class shared cloud, however, helps ensure that customers will always have access to their contracted resource by logically dedicating IT resources to each customer as if they were hosted on dedicated hardware. And with SunGard’s ‘Flex’ option, customers can rapidly provision additional capacity – including virtual machines and processors, memory and storage – by up to 100% of their existing allocation, allowing them to scale rapidly as their business dictates.
Most customer IT environments are encumbered by complex infrastructures running demanding applications – such as vital legacy hardware or ultra-low latency trading platforms – which compromise organisations’ ability to provision Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SunGard’s model allows a customer to combine IaaS with a highly evolved managed services offering, helping to ensure uninterrupted access to key systems and data whatever environment they reside. This hybrid approach means applications and data are delivered back to the customer seamlessly and reliably, irrespective of whether the actual applications are running within virtual or physical environments. All SunGard’s services are underpinned by its heritage which spans five decades of delivering Information Availability and highly resilient infrastructures, from the architecture through to SLAs, audit trails and management procedures.
Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services, commented: “In SunGard sponsored research on cloud computing, CIOs revealed their top concerns were around the risk of downtime, loss of control and the security of sensitive data. SunGard’s comprehensive IaaS can help enable organisations to exploit the cloud’s benefits without undue risk, as it is built from the ground up on availability. SunGard’s enterprise-class shared cloud, which balances the utilisation efficiency and affordability of multi-tenanted architecture with the reassurance of exclusive resource at the virtual level, means customers can get the true scalability that the cloud has always promised, but in a secure and resilient environment.”
“We want the cost benefits of a shared cloud environment, but if we have to quickly scale up or down, we can’t be restricted from doing so because someone else happens to be using the capacity,” commented James Dunlap, president at Cycle30, the Seattle, US-based cloud billing services provider. “We can’t limit the level of computing power we’ll need to serve our customers at any given time, nor can we compromise on the accessibility and integrity of our customers’ data. The flexibility and the resilience built into SunGard’s cloud infrastructure are hugely reassuring.”
“Whether in a virtual or physical environment, CIOs’ concerns are exactly the same,” commented Steve Wallage, Managing Director, BroadGroup Consulting. “They absolutely have to know that their data is managed appropriately and that it’s always available when they need it. While required levels of security and availability vary hugely for different organisations, and different applications within each organisation, the constant is that vendors’ enterprise-standard IaaS offerings have to be secure, flexible and resilient.”
About SunGard Availability Services
SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, Information Availability consulting services and business continuity management software to over 9,000 customers in North America and Europe. With approximately five million square feet of data centre and operations space, SunGard assists IT organisations across virtually all industry and government sectors prepare for and recover from emergencies by helping them minimise their computer downtime and optimise their uptime. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organisations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. Visit SunGard Availability Services at www.sungard.co.uk or call 0800 143 413.
SunGard Availability Services (UK) Limited has been recognised as Service Provider of the Year an unprecedented eight times in the Business Continuity Awards’ thirteen-year history, and has been a finalist on all but one occasion: a track record unequalled in the industry. In 2008, SunGard was presented the 10th Anniversary Award for Outstanding Excellence in Business Continuity. SunGard and its customers have also achieved success in the Most Innovative Product, Most Effective Recovery, Industry Personality, Lifetime Achievement and Consultant of the Year categories, amongst others.
Representing Intellect, the trade association, on the steering committee for BS 25999, SunGard helped to define the first standard of its kind, which is alerting the wider business community to the importance of business continuity management. SunGard then became the first business continuity expert to secure certification against the BS 25999 Standard, which it retained in 2010. It is now in the unique position of being able to assist its customers – both large and small alike – through the certification process drawing on its own experience.
About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, please visit www.sungard.com.
Trademark Information: SunGard and the SunGard logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.