Sungard Availability Services
Disaster Recovery Plans for Actual Hybrid IT Environments

Business interruptions are common and many executives are confident about their company’s current disaster recovery capabilities. Yet, many organizations have disaster recovery plans, backup protocols, and communication procedures in place, but they often do not equal true recoverability. “CIOs need resiliency for their overall business and not just data or IT, testing and keeping up-to-date recovery plans,” says Andrew A. Stern, CEO, Sungard Availability Services. Various technological advancements like cloud services and virtualization are emerging to enable organizations re-plan, test and execute their DR strategies. However, IT and security executives need to figure out ways to leverage these developments so that they improve, rather than complicate the DR efforts. Assisting organizations to leverage these advancements for implementing strategic DR plans is Sungard Availability Services—a provider of critical production and recovery services to global enterprise companies. The company tailors its recovery services to match the unique customer requirements, delivering desired business outcomes.

The company’s Recovery-as-a- Service offering provides a holistic approach to business resiliency. “Our comprehensive RaaS solution is designed to be flexible to work with complex, hybrid systems based on customers’ needs, addressing a full range of recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs),” says Stern. The company has developed various approaches to manage clients’ recovery, environment and data protection. Sungard’s Managed Recovery Program (MRP) provides a complete set of people, processes, tools, and environments to ensure complete, compliant, and effective testing and data recovery.

Our Recovery-as-a-Service solution offers a holistic approach to business resiliency

Most companies believe in the fixed budget and a well-staffed IT department to better their work in house. They underestimate the cost required to run a full-blown IT recovery program and function without testing the recovery plan regularly.

The company’s MRP solution extends the benefit of predictable cost savings, guaranteed recovery through regular testing and increased productivity by minimizing the DR workload for its clients’ staff. Sungard’s solution for cloud disaster recovery supports complex, heterogeneous IT environments and provides high availability and true business technology resiliency.

As a disaster can strike anywhere and at anytime, it becomes essential to have an efficient data protection program in place. Understanding the importance of backup, Sungard AS guarantees reliable movement of data, regularly testing to ensure data recovery at any given time. Further, to provide enterprises an ensured hosting of their secondary or recovery site, the company offers prominent managed hosting services backed by enterprise-class service level agreements. Additionally, Sungard AS’ experience on a broad range of server environments provides customers immediate access to the company’s recovery, redundancy, and connectivity expertise.

Sungard AS assists customers in optimizing their recovery to unleash new opportunities and services. For instance, CSG International—provider of business critical software and service solutions for the telecommunications industry required a system that could avoid data loss and foster quick recovery. Sungard AS connected CGS infrastructure to the required servers quickly. As a result, CGS received formal change management process to ensure up-to-date data and applications strategy.

The company has successfully strengthened the security postures of numerous clients through an array of services. However, Stern perceives that disaster recovery program is still on the ‘to do’ list for many organizations. As a result, the company aims to continue modifying its solution to suite the escalating DR needs and expand the market reach. “To assure our customers are inclined towards a better DR position, we will assist them with their recovery testing efforts,” concludes Stern.