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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.

Cloud computing is being rapidly embraced across all industries. But this massive shift from local hardware to web-based resources is not risk- and hazard-free.

Concerns about security are running high. And questions about business relevance and resiliency remain. This white paper covers strategies for addressing those questions.

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.