60 day trial for CIOs to experience resilience and flexibility of SunGard’s shared private cloud
London, UK – Wednesday 14th December 2011: SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, is offering an initiative for CIOs to test the benefits of a cloud computing environment in its most resilient and flexible form.
Available to enterprises for a limited time, organisations can access SunGard’s fully managed enterprise-class shared cloud in Europe for 60 days with no commitment to any long term contract. This initiative has been designed to allow those businesses thinking of making the move to cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or even those that are unsure about the benefits such services offer, the chance to trial SunGard’s highly resilient infrastructure – built from over a decade’s experience in working with enterprise customers to deliver tailored managed service solutions.
There continues to be countless promises that IaaS will deliver lower costs, increased flexibility and capital expenditure free computing, all of which have only served for IT decision makers to treat third party solutions with a degree of scepticism and think cynically about what can be achieved for them. According to research conducted earlier this year by Vanson Bourne amongst 250 UK CIOs and sponsored by SunGard Availability Services, only 10% of CIOs feel ‘completely confident’ in the security and resilience of third party cloud solutions.
Offering a trial of IaaS services permits organisations to ‘try before they buy’ and to experience the breadth of the solutions on an enterprise scale while helping to further instil business confidence in the cloud.
“CIOs have long been wary of hype around new platforms and services – often with good reason – and this has left many cynical about vendors’ ‘slideware’. We’re confident our Infrastructure as a Service will deliver on the cloud’s promises and so have been offering trials to existing customers for some time,” commented Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services. “We’ve had extremely positive reactions when we’ve managed a variety of different applications in our private cloud, so we’re broadening it out to any organisation.”
“We work in partnership with our customers where they retain control of their systems, but we are accountable for their availability: the resilient infrastructure upon which our platform is built and our broad experience means they have the confidence to place their most crucial live environments in the cloud with us.”
All SunGard’s services are underpinned by its heritage which spans five decades of delivering Information Availability and highly resilient infrastructures, and its enterprise-class shared cloud is governed by SLAs so customers may be confident they will always have access to their full contracted resource. With the ‘Flex’ option, customers can also rapidly provision enterprise size additional capacity – including virtual machines and processors, memory and storage – at up to 100% of their existing allocation. An online ticket retailer for example, who is anticipating high demand for a forthcoming concert could look at deploying 10’s of additional virtual machines in a short space of time, allowing them to scale rapidly as their business dictates.
Tilley continues, “SunGard’s reputation is built on delivering exceptional levels of availability, resilience and recovery. We’ve seen the range of things that can go wrong and know that system and data availability are key pain points for organisations looking to the cloud, and with good reason too – the platform your data is delivered on or stored in is irrelevant if it’s not resilient.”
Interested parties can find out more about the Proof of Concept and the SLAs behind it at: www.sungard.co.uk/cloud.
-ENDS