Updates on new breakthroughs in the Cloud Computing, Disaster Recovery, and Managed Hosting industries are a must-read

SunGard Availability Services today announced the company has been honored with a 2011 Excellence in Cloud Computing Award from TMC’s Cloud Computing magazine for its Enterprise Cloud Services. SunGard has distinguished itself in the market by delivering a fully managed cloud environment with enterprise-grade application availability and security.

SunGard Availability Services announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with NAV CANADA, Canada’s private sector civil air navigation services provider, to offer SunGard Workforce Continuity Services at the NAV CENTRE conference facility, located in Cornwall, Ontario. An industry leader in workforce recovery, SunGard provides organizations with temporary employee workspace, equipment, secure access, email, and telephone connectivity in the event of a business interruption or disaster.

The calendar has closed on what many are calling the “Year of Disasters.” The United States set a record with 12 separate billion dollar weather/climate disasters in 2011, with an aggregate damage total of approximately $52 billion, according to NOAA. These incidents have prompted many organizations to reconsider the human element during a crisis or major news event, and evaluate how they communicate with employees, suppliers, investors and customers.

For most organizations, a successful cloud computing implementation requires connecting the cloud to existing computing environments. Energy Plus Holdings LLC, one of the nation’s fastest-growing energy companies, is adopting a hybrid cloud model for running production applications that utilizes both SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services and existing managed services the company employs from SunGard. This model allows Energy Plus to move applications to the cloud at its own pace and easily scale its infrastructure on demand with the cloud as customer growth requires.

Reply! Inc., a leading marketplace for acquisition of locally-targeted consumer traffic, including MerchantCircle.com, Contractors.com, adHUBS.com, Bloglines.com and iMotors.com, has chosen SunGard Availability Services to host its newly deployed private cloud infrastructure. SunGard will provide a managed virtual environment for Reply!’s private cloud which will help enable Reply!’s growth and accelerate time-to-market for new product offerings.

SunGard Availability Services today announced the availability of cloud-based SAP Services, designed to meet the availability, security, operations, and capacity needs of SAP ERP environments. The new service leverages the best in class Vblock^TM cloud platform to provide a production ready cloud infrastructure for SAP ERP and NetWeaver applications, whether a single new development environment or full multi-landscape SAP deployment.

SunGard Availability Services today announced its Managed Recovery Program (MRP), a new offering that takes the pain out of application recovery for complex IT environments. With this service, SunGard experts manage the entire recovery lifecycle for organizations, helping lower the cost, burden and risk in the recovery processes. Organizations working with SunGard MRP have been able to raise their confidence in recovery, while refocusing their efforts on primary production operations.

SunGard Availability Services today announced a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin to create a Cloud Computing Research Center. Through the partnership, SunGard and UT Austin will jointly identify relevant and unsolved research problems in the cloud-computing field, pursue targeted research initiatives to solve those problems and commercialize as appropriate the resulting research.

SunGard Availability Services today announced it has been certified as a Cisco Master Managed Services Channel Partner (MSCP). This official designation identifies SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services as meeting the highest level of achievement for partners delivering Cisco technologies as a managed solution. SunGard was also certified as a Cisco Cloud Provider to offer Cisco Powered IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) Cloud, which recognizes SunGard’s delivery of exceptional cloud services in a multitenant environment to end customers.

Powell’s Books, Portland, Oregon’s legendary, independent bookstore, has chosen SunGard Availability Services to host mission critical applications, including its e-commerce website, www.powells.com.

SunGard Availability Services today announced the expansion of its Philadelphia data center at 1500 Spring Garden Street to accommodate growing demand for SunGard’s portfolio of cloud computing, colocation and managed IT services. The Spring Garden Data Center expansion incorporates sustainable environmental controls to advance green IT initiatives.

Organizations moving essential business applications to the cloud often face concerns they may need to sacrifice application availability to gain the cost and on-demand capacity advantages of cloud computing. To help organizations address uptime requirements, SunGard Availability Services has become one of the first cloud services vendors to deliver high availability as part of its standard offering, helping customers to reduce cloud-based application downtime.

Application availability is a key priority for IT organizations supporting mission-critical business processes. But many companies grapple with identifying the most effective, secure and efficient solution that fits the complexity of their IT environments. To help organizations meet this challenge, SunGard Availability Services is augmenting its portfolio of offerings with Recover2Cloud, a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels.

ChuanhowTech has become an authorized representative for SunGard Availability Services in Taiwan and Hong Kong. An information and communications technology (ICT) provider and systems integrator, ChuanhowTech will sell and support SunGard’s Continuity Management Solution, business continuity software.

Internet-based applications have become commonplace even within more traditional brick and mortar organizations. With the uptick in online business transactions however, the business risk associated with electronic threats has also grown, making information security a key concern of IT and business unit leaders. To help organizations address these challenges, SunGard Availability Services has expanded its Managed Security Services portfolio with enhanced Log and Threat Management Services designed to defend networks and mission-critical data from security breaches and attacks.

In today’s business environment where many customers expect 24/7 availability to corporate information assets, business continuity planning has become one of the pillars of maintaining a solid brand reputation. How an organization plans for and responds to business disruptions can have a major impact on its perceived reliability among customers and on the company’s bottom line.

SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, has today announced its expansion into India with two new dedicated Workplace Recovery facilities. The opening of the new centers follows the signing of a dedicated workplace recovery contract with a major international bank, and aims to meet the demand from international businesses for high levels of resilience for their key operations, whereby mission-critical, off-shore or outsourced business processes are protected according to business value, not just location.

Hurricane season brings into focus the need for companies to reexamine disaster recovery plans. SunGard Availability Services advises organizations to approach hurricane preparedness not as a reactive disaster recovery process but as the opportunity to manage a hurricane as a planned event. The plan process can benefit organizations not just on their worst day, in the wake of a disaster, but every day, by revealing critical gaps in the availability of production environments.

SunGard Availability Services will showcase its Nashville data center with an Open House on Thursday, June 16, 2011 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. The free event includes discussions on how Nashville area companies can leverage SunGard’s portfolio of colocation, managed IT and cloud computing services to address business IT needs without incurring the capital and operational expenses of building and running their own data centers.

SunGard Announces Chief Executive Officer Transition

An excellent starting point for an organization looking at cloud computing platforms is to examine its IT architecture. Only by aligning the architecture – compute, network, data center, power and storage resources – with applications can a company be on the path to achieve the reliability and performance it requires within a cloud environment.

SunGard Availability Services announced today additions to its executive leadership team to fully support, develop and grow its services as well as further reinforce its leadership position in disaster recovery services, enterprise cloud services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

SunGard Availability Services has announced enhancements to PLANet, a Web-based business continuity planning tool for community banks and credit unions that helps ensure business continuity plans are constructed according to financial industry regulations and best practices. The new capabilities are customer-driven enhancements that help financial organizations lower business risk and simplify regulatory compliance while also improving disaster preparedness.

SunGard Availability Services has expanded its Business Partner Program with the addition of the SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services to the channel program. SunGard’s partners can now tap the fast-growing cloud computing market by offering SunGard’s fully managed, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform.

Many organizations are keenly aware of the importance of backing up data, but backup without data recovery does not provide effective business protection. At Storage Networking World, SunGard Availability Services (booth #501) will show organizations how to help reduce data loss and downtime risk while also cutting cost and complexity of backup and recovery processes.

SunGard Availability Services’ Continuity Management Solution is the prevailing leader in businesses continuity software according to a new, independent research survey which included more than 2,600 business continuity professionals. Survey results indicated that around 50 percent of organizations use a business continuity software tool. Of the positive respondents, SunGard’s Living Disaster Recovery Planning System (LDRPS) is used by 62 percent and SunGard’s BIA Professional software is used by 37 percent while the rest of the primary providers received a combined total of 19 percent.

Often resource constrained, IT departments in companies and government organizations are immersed in workday responsibilities needed to support the business. Cloud computing can help take pressure off IT staff while also helping deliver measurable business benefits. For instance, with cloud computing, organizations can leverage the benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without having to implement and administer it directly.

Cycle30, a subsidiary of GCI, Alaska’s largest telecommunications and cable provider (NASDAQ: GNCMA), has selected the enterprise-grade cloud platform from SunGard Availability Services to launch its billing services for telecom, cable and utility operators in North America. By working with SunGard, Cycle30 is able to simplify its overall IT infrastructure and quickly deliver cloud-based, order-to-cash services that integrate ordering, provisioning, billing and back-office revenue systems.