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SunGard Assurance^CM is a very different approach to business continuity planning. It’s built to drive widespread adoption, which builds business continuity competency and trust across your organization. We’ve built Assurance^CM on a backbone of visual, logical and intuitive effectiveness originating from more than 2,000 customer interactions, and we continuously validate new functionality using the same objective, user-centered, live testing.

Many organizations risk disruption to their operations because they lack enterprise-wide governance management of business continuity. The SunGard Business Continuity Management (BCM) solution offers expertise in developing comprehensive BCM programs that address your organization’s greatest business availability risks — including the most probable and highest impact business continuity gaps. Customized solutions leverage our full suite of availability services for organizations at all levels of BCM maturity.

Hybrid IT — an environment that encompasses a wide mix of assets as well as internal and external IT services — requires enlightened governance. At present, the specter of “shadow IT” threatens to put enterprises at serious risk. By acting unilaterally, lines of business take steps that could prove detrimental to the reputation of the enterprise.

Information Lifecycle Governance is SunGard’s programmatic approach to managing the flow of data from the moment it’s created and stored until the time it’s obsolete and disposed of properly. SunGard is uniquely qualified in the industry with a consulting and services team that offers expertise in clients’ data environments as well as knowledge and capabilities in data, risk, business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR), storage, legal and eDiscovery, and records management. We have decades of collective experience managing complex client data and storage environments. We can also recommend and implement technology solutions (e.g., data protection, litigation hold, content management) in a vendor-agnostic manner to support your ILG strategy.

What do the following events have in common: cyberattacks, severe weather, health pandemics, and power outages? They all drive organizations to develop a very sophisticated means of "availability" — maintaining uninterrupted business operations. The key to success is building availability processes for operational resilience that integrate, orchestrate, and align the priorities and objectives of line-of-business (LOB) executives, such as CXOs and VPs/managers of business processes, with those of IT.

The wide-scale adoption and rapid move to the Cloud is being met by a similarly explosive growth in the number of providers offering services. Unfortunately, not all cloud services are created equal. The wrong choice—going with a commodity cloud provider for critical workloads, for example—can have significant consequences and could lead to a loss of revenue, productivity, reputation, and customers. A wrong choice can also increase IT costs and in some cases, result in regulatory and civil penalties and fines.

Enterprises are now actively making the shift toward hybrid IT arrangements and delegating an increasing number of activities to trusted partners. The reason? IT environments have become too costly and complex to manage without specialized assistance.

Cost-cutting pressures on CIOs have led many to accept more risk and settle into a mindset that their Disaster Recovery (DR) program is comprehensive, when, in fact, it might not hold up when matched against the company’s business requirements.

If you’re like many organizations, you have an inadequate disaster recovery (DR) program that leaves you vulnerable to risks such as loss of revenue, penalties and fines, not to mention the potential for negative impact to your business reputation due to downtime or data loss. Despite these risks, you’re likely having a difficult time justifying an adequate investment in DR to your senior management. You may feel like the only way you can attract management’s attention to this issue is to manually pull the plug on your data center on a regular basis.

So if you’ve been tasked with creating a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan for your team, function, business unit, or company, you can likely get yourself 80% of the way there by taking an existing disaster recovery plan template and customizing it to your specific situation. The goal of this white paper, therefore, is to share insights into effective disaster recovery plan templates that we at SunGard AS have gained over the last 30 years, as well as to provide a sample template that you can follow when writing your own BC/DR plan.

When making the choice between build vs. buy, both approaches offer similar benefits. Cloud technology lets organizations make more efficient use of IT resources, allows for the automation of many routine tasks, and easily scales to accommodate new IT service demands and business growth.

In March of 2012, SunGard Availability Services sponsored an independent study looking into the IT needs and direction of the Healthcare Provider Sector. This report describes key findings from that study which may help improve data center resiliency for those in the Healthcare Provider Sector. The study included over 250 Healthcare IT professionals (both business and technology influencers and decision makers) employed at Healthcare Providers across North America with annual revenues of $100M+ and/or 100+ beds.

Financial services firms face growing IT complexity due to increasing mergers, proliferating product lines, and ongoing security and compliance concerns.

While these firms once handled information technology exclusively in house, many are now looking to comprehensive strategic service providers for assistance in managing their data centers and production environments. Many firms are finding that this IT model reduces complexity and costs while improving performance and availability through outsourcing. It further enhances a firm’s ability to strategically transform its IT infrastructure by integrating business applications, enhancing security, addressing compliance, and meeting critical disaster recovery requirements. This white paper details the services that address the concerns of financial services firms and proposes criteria for use in identifying a service provider.

Business Continuance (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are often thought of as the same discipline, yet they are not. Business Continuance plans, processes, and technologies are put in place to allow a company to carry on operations during a natural or man-made crisis, including terrorism. Disaster Recovery is what is done when BC and High Availability plans did not work or were never put in place.

This white paper details the critical elements necessary to put in place the three key components of a comprehensive IT DR solution: backup hardware, software, and the surrounding program. It then describes how selectively utilizing the services and capabilities of a DR specialist — for example, leveraging SunGard Availability Services’ Managed Recovery Program (MRP) — may help reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of an IT DR program.

By the time Hurricane Sandy made landfall, we received 342 alerts and 117 disaster declarations for our disaster recovery customers. Just as important, hundreds of our managed hosting customers who trust us to keep their production applications and IT environments always available had no interruption of service – with 100% uptime. Additionally, our Carlstadt data center also served as an impromptu community command center for local law enforcement, medical and first response teams.

In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the Caribbean, mid-Atlantic, and northeastern United States with devastating impact, causing an estimated $65.6 billion in losses due to damage and business interruption. Here at SunGard, we received 342 alerts and 117 disaster declarations due to Hurricane Sandy alone.

By encouraging the development of HIT standards, healthcare reform is enabling healthcare organizations to more easily adopt technology. By providing incentives for higher quality and more coordinated care and extending privacy requirements, healthcare reform is encouraging hospitals to consolidate to pool their resources to more easily meet new requirements. Such consolidation, in turn, drives the need for healthcare organizations to simplify and standardize their IT infrastructure. Healthcare reform is also encouraging the development of health information exchanges.

Don't forget about the most important element of your business continuity planning: your people. After all, what use would it be to have your systems, data, networks, and applications up and running if there are no people to use them? And who will recover them in the first place, if not your people? This white paper identifies 5 new trends in business continuity planning that involve putting your workforce at the center: a tiered workforce, strategic communications, blended solutions, workforce resiliency, and rigorous exercises. Read this white paper to learn more about how to fortify your business' resiliency and your disaster recovery program by taking your people into consideration.

This white paper discusses the challenges to disaster recovery posed by data center virtualization. Contrary to popular belief, data center virtualization has actually made disaster recovery (DR) harder, not easier. This is because the world is not 100% virtualized, and production environments have become an ever more complex hybrid of platforms, operating systems, hypervisors, storage, and databases. The increasing heterogeneity presents a significant IT disaster recovery challenge, as the physical and virtual compute stacks for each and every application in the production environment must be re-created in the recovery environment. This creates a complex change management challenge, as well as significant capex and opex commitments for the organization. In this paper, SunGard Availability Services presents a 4-pronged strategy for addressing these challenges.

A business continuity or disaster recovery plan that isn’t tested isn’t real. So who better than SunGard, a name synonymous with BCDR, to add real testing methodologies to its suite of DR planning software?

Cloud can seem as intangible and mercurial as its namesake. But with a solid strategy and the right guidance, businesses can confidently move forward: making sound business decisions, charting a direct course through migration, and reaping the many benefits the cloud offers. But what are the key elements of a successful cloud strategy? Forgetting for a moment the over-hyped assertions that “everyone is moving to the cloud” and “the cloud is the right decision for every business,” how will you determine if the cloud is the single best solution for your organization, or is just part of a more complex composite solution?

Writing a plan is not enough. Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on demonstrating business resilience of mission critical business processes. But with the myriad of tests possible, how does an organization decide upon and justify what it will test? SunGard Availability Services offers guidance on how this can be addressed by applying key elements from risk management and business impact analysis – in essence, taking a risk-based approach.

In May 2012, the International Standards Organization (ISO) published the long-awaited. ISO 22301 which utilizes as a foundation BS 25999:2: a standard which has already garnered broad acceptance outside the UK. This paper outlines how this new standard “Societal Security – Business Continuity Management Systems – Requirements” offers a robust framework for individual organizations to build their own Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS).

As more businesses shift infrastructure components to third party data centers, it is important to address security concerns as part of the decision. The best service providers will address your data protection concerns by offering platform security services and adhering to a stringent process discipline in order to protect your organization's mission-critical infrastructure. Learn the questions that you should discuss with a potential service provider.

Long-time managed services and disaster recovery specialist SunGard is raising its game by offering Enterprise Cloud Services. Enterprise Cloud Services allows SunGard to deliver security and availability for organizations’ compute, network, and storage resources and ultimately help them contain costs and provide efficiencies that might not otherwise be possible due to the increasing demand on their internal IT resources.

SunGard’s Recover2Cloud services deliver offsite data protection and disaster recovery—complete with important features such as service automation, recovery orchestration, and contractually guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs).

Long-time managed services and disaster recovery specialist SunGard is raising its game by offering Enterprise Cloud Services. Enterprise Cloud Services allows SunGard to deliver security and availability for organizations’ compute, network, and storage resources and ultimately help them contain costs and provide efficiencies that might not otherwise be possible due to the increasing demand on their internal IT resources.

IT organizations are tasked to manage rapid change from both technology and the business. This state of constant change creates an element of risk: if a key application is not documented or a step in an application recovery process is not covered, recovery tests may fail or, worse, applications and data may be lost in a live disaster scenario. SunGard’s Managed Recovery Program (MRP) alleviates the pain associated with application recovery and the related challenges of change management and updating recovery plans by allowing customers to outsource these critical but oftentimes neglected tasks. SunGard’s program is uniquely designed for each customer to help meet its RTO/RPO service levels.

Many organizations forego investing in true operational resilience. They see risk management as a challenge that resides solely at the enterprise level — and not one that must be addressed at the service and functional area level, as well. While a holistic view of risk is essential to the resilience of an organization, increasingly complex operational environments often cause top-down approaches to fail.

Colocation requirements can no longer be expressed in terms of square footage. That’s because the amount of physical space required to house colocated infrastructure is in large part determined by the power and cooling demands of the hardware. This white paper examines the relationship between wattage and floor space in a data center, and demonstrates the calculations an IT organization can perform in order to determine its power requirements—because only then can it determine how much square footage is truly necessary.

“Colocation is all about economies of scale, focusing on your core competencies as a business and letting someone else handle the data center aspect,” says Joe Sullivan, senior director, colocation product management with SunGard Availability Services. “From a financial perspective, it allows you to take a large cash outlay or capital expense and convert that into an operating expense.”

Smart Business spoke with Sullivan about how to decide if colocation is right for you, and what to look for in a colocation provider.

A growing number of businesses are using cloud computing to access resources over the Internet, store data and run applications. However, in abandoning traditional on-premise computing and data storage for a cloud-based solution, many companies fear what will happen if the remote data center housing the cloud experiences its own crash.

If a disaster struck your company, could you recover? Do you have a place to store your data so it’s safe and accessible, and do you have a way to recover it after a disaster without bankrupting the company?

Investing in redundant infrastructure and hiring specialized staff to protect yourself is hard to justify in today’s business climate, especially when the rising cost of disaster recovery pushes other critical projects to the back burner. But the answer may be in the cloud, says Ram Shanmugam, senior director of product management for Recovery Services at SunGard Availability Services.

Recovering from a disaster hinges on accurate and current disaster recovery procedures. Many organizations fail to recover or take longer to recover because these procedures are not accurate or not current. Production Information Technology environments are constantly changing. This means that an effective change management practice that includes a process for updating recovery procedures and recovery configurations is a crucial component to successful restoration. Changes in the production environment happen daily, impacting recovery. As a result, the recovery plan must be kept up to date with day-to-day production changes.

It is important to recognize that risk cannot be 100% eliminated. However, it can be significantly reduced to a level that is acceptable for a given business. The most crucial step in reducing risk is vendor selection. The right vendor will work in partnership with a client company at every step in order to maximize cloud security. This is key: security is a collaborative effort between the vendor and the client. The vendor cannot guarantee absolute security, but can provide the means so that the vendor and client together can make security a practical reality. With this in mind, companies should take a layered approach when assessing cloud vendors.

Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) has been available for some time, and has leveraged a number of infrastructure options and recovery platforms. Many of these options have provided a recovery solution that is flexible, scalable, and secure. And in some cases, service providers offer fully managed solutions with the expertise to support heterogeneous IT environments.

Most organizations lack three fundamental components essential to managing recovery from a disaster: continually updated recovery processes, staff availability for test and recovery, and on-staff recovery expertise. Finding the right service provider with the experience necessary to deliver effective recovery management cover that gap effectively and efficiently.

PCI DSS Requirements 6, 10 and 11 can be the most costly and resource-intensive, as they require log management, vulnerability assessment, and intrusion detection. Fortunately, new service-based solutions can now deliver these capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional software or appliance-based solutions. These solutions are changing the way that IT compliance and security solutions are designed, delivered, and utilized. This paper illustrates 10 ways you can use these new solutions to demonstrate compliance with PCI DSS 1.2.

Deep in the halls of many IT organizations lives a worrier: a professional paid to assume the worst, plan for disasters, and contemplate the unthinkable. They are the Disaster Recovery Planner. They may prefer “contingency” or “business continuity” as part of their identity, but their role is clear: document what needs to happen to keep the business running and teach the rest of us our roles. SunGard Continuity Management Solution (CMS) is a suite of software tools and best practices that help automate and maintain a functional and auditable DR plan.

The “meaningful use” of electronic medical records, mandated by the Healthcare Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, is changing the nature of healthcare across the nation. The danger is that many healthcare IT organizations do not realize exactly how deep that change needs to be.

When it comes to building a business continuity management (BCM) program that’s complete, current, and compliant, there is no substitute for BCM software. But the benefits of a good BCM program extend beyond just using an automated tool. Leveraging the right BCM software and services provider also makes real business sense, before, during and after business interruption.

Assembling an effective plan for a cloud infrastructure is paramount. When organizations put the right strategic pieces in place the result is maximum return on investment and an ability to achieve competitive differentiation.

The benefits of cloud are transformative because, by replacing in-house infrastructure with a scalable and efficient service, they allow an IT organization to move out of a functional role based on procurement and maintenance and toward a leadership role founded on guiding and participating in core business initiatives.

Businesses today operate in an environment where significant application downtime and data loss lead easily to lost productivity, lost revenue and lost customers. A better backup and recovery process is within online reach of your business.

An organization’s data is its lifeblood; productivity is only as good as the availability of the data. That’s why, in an effort to maximize productivity and minimize risk, organizations increasingly are placing at least a portion of their infrastructure in colocation data centers. The timing is right for it, too. In recent years, the total cost of colocating in data centers has dropped significantly. Even for small businesses, colocation is no longer a pie-in-the-sky objective.

IT functions in business are complicated enough. For the business majority, adding data protection expertise as a core competency simply does not make fiscal sense. Turning that function over to the leading solution in online backup and recovery—EVault—will save time, money and aggravation. Secure2Disk powered by EVault has the right online backup solution for companies that are serious about protecting business-critical data.

In the past decade, the proliferation of colocation data centers that house and host servers has made moving servers out of house a viable option for those who need to build or enhance IT capability. You no longer have to keep your servers in-house – along with all the headaches that come with it: power, UPS and back-up power, cooling, communication backbone, security, and a long list of additional concerns.

Determining the Best Option for Your Company

No matter how fast storage ability, data rates, and processor speeds increase, the demand that users place on IT infrastructure continues to expand. IT departments must continually look forward and plan in order to meet future requirements.

“IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN, PLAN TO FAIL”
goes the old adage. In the current age of hyper-connectivity and uber-accessibility, dependence on real-time technology and applications brings an even greater need for technologycentric disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Most organizations understand this, yet despite the increased awareness, IT disaster recovery plans continue to fail when needed most; during a disaster or disruption.

Business Continuity Management has undergone many changes in recent years, both in scale and scope. It has come a long way from its tactical beginnings in computer disaster recovery, and is now moving toward a much more business-focused position with an emphasis on operational risk prevention and resilience planning.

Many of the issues driving the current change in approach to Business Continuity Management have been steadily growing for years. These issues include stricter international standards, rigorous compliance requirements, a broader understanding of internal and external risk, and a priority on minimum downtime and maximum information availability.

Using Business Continuity Management software to manage risk and resilience

This paper assesses the evolution of Business Continuity Management (BCM) from its traditional technology roots towards a more business-focused approach. It also considers the value of BCM software as an enabler of this transition.

Right now, businesses around the world are struggling to recover from the devastation caused by both natural and manmade disasters. The idea that your company could one day find itself in the same position is hardly inconceivable.

Having a detailed and organized business continuity management (BCM) strategy in place and ready to use if the need arises substantially increases the likelihood that your enterprise will be able to get back into action swiftly and efficiently after a crisis or disaster.

Whether your business is involved with it yet or not, cloud computing will play a significant role in the future of IT: it has already been enthusiastically embraced by small and medium sized businesses and its potential is also being accepted and exploited by larger enterprises.

It is imperative that SMBs recognize and plan for the potential risks that exist in today’s IT-focused climate. Download the whitepaper to discover the five steps you need to consider when developing a business continuity plan for your organization.

Just like their non-virtualized counterparts, virtualized infrastructures require a plan for when a business disruption or disaster strikes. Also like their non-virtualized counterparts, local redundancy while enhanced due to virtualization-enabled high availability and pooling of resources, only goes so far. It can never be a substitute for a second geographically segregated disaster recovery site. Download and read this executive level overview of Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR) benefits and planning considerations.

Organizations can’t control whether or not they will be affected by a natural disaster, power outage or other unplanned incident, but they can work to help ensure their business is prepared to respond to and recover from these events with minimal impact. Disaster recovery planning is an organizational imperative that can help reduce risk and help companies effectively respond to situations that threaten to disrupt essential business processes. Find out more. Download the white paper today.

Focused on short-term pressures to make budget cuts, it often escapes companies that disaster preparedness needs may actually be greater during economic slowdowns. For instance, many organizations are reducing costs by consolidating equipment. But because of e-discovery and compliance requirements, data must still be retained even with a cap on spending. Read more about why Disaster Recovery readiness is so critical to your organization. Download the whitepaper.

In today's corporate environment, CIOs and security managers need to protect information assets such as intellectual property (IP) and personally identifiable information (PII). Key business drivers for data protection include: Regulatory compliance; competition in the market; legal and recovery costs associated with breaches; and Brand risk. So how do risk managers address these issues? Find out in the eBook.

IT organizations are recognizing the benefits of selecting a colocation provider for their mission-critical equipment in a data center. Discover what you need to consider when selecting a colocation provider for your organization.

A pandemic: widespread disease on global proportions is a frightening thought. In the case of the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the very real potential for a pandemic can be understood when we recognize that today, there is no known antiviral treatment for this strain of virus, and over the past few years, the mortality rate for people who are infected is over 50 percent. The World Health Organization (WHO) has tracked 499 known cases of the H5N1 virus globally, and 295 deaths have been reported as of early June 2010.