Service Overview
Cloud solutions deliver real benefits to businesses, particularly from increased cost efficiency, improved flexibility and enhanced resilience. Cloud provides computing power, data storage and the associated security and connectivity without the need for the customer to buy any hardware, O/S licenses, and management tools or provide additional support teams which means almost zero capital expenditure.
Cloud infrastructures will benefit you by:
- High availability – designed to the highest specifications for resiliency to minimise downtime enabling SLA based services to be delivered to the customer;
- Efficiency – The underlying technology focuses on maximising the utilisation of computing power and disk storage resulting in less wasted resource.
- Flexibility - Customers need only to buy what they require today rather than buying an IT solution that they will have to grow into over time and then provision extra resource as and when it is needed.
SunGard’s Feasibility Study delivers a formal report of findings and recommendations enabling organisations to make an informed decision on migrating their services into a cloud environment.
Options
There are two Cloud consultancy services that SunGard offer. These cover:
- Cloud Feasibility Study
An understanding of where you are and what your objectives mean. This service determines what hardware and applications can be optimized through virtualisation, a fundamental cloud component. Comprehensive analysis not only identifies benefits, risks and gaps, but also determines the financial impact on the organisation.
- Cloud Strategy & Design
This service evaluates strategic options of different cloud solutions, and plans and designs the IT infrastructure that meets the business and technical requirements. Options are evaluated against the objectives documented in the Feasibility Study report.
The Benefits
The benefits of these services to the customer are:
- Where and how cloud fits into the business strategy.
- Evaluation of potential business upside and risks associated with migrating to a cloud solution, while also incorporating best practices for information availability.
- Clear business case for both IT and business continuity by highlighting expected benefits and cost savings of transitioning to cloud based services.
- Key design recommendations tailored to specific objectives.
What does it involve?
The Cloud Feasibility Study comprises of 3 phases:
- Requirements Capture
- Detailed Analysis
- Report/Presentation
In the requirements capture, SunGard would look to fully understand the objectives and drivers of the project. The requirements are elicited across both business and IT functions to ensure that all factors are taken into consideration.
Requirements capture takes the form of a client meeting/workshop and will assist in the production of the Sizing Report.
The discussion may include:
- How cloud computing fits into your business technology strategy
- Implications, benefits and business value
- Devising a business technology strategy leveraging the cloud.
The detailed analysis is conducted to verify where virtualisation and cloud is achievable and of benefit. The process evaluates the existing architecture, hardware dependencies, specialised configurations and application vendor support and assesses the utilisation of the existing servers in order to define the correct cloud solution.