High availability hosting with Workplace Recovery
With its entire business dependent on the stability of its IT, GTA needed a partner that could provide the resilient infrastructure vital for the hosting of its production systems. Since 2003, it has relied on Sungard Availability Services to keep its business running uninterrupted. Commenting on the solution it has put in place, Tony Gavin, Vice President, Vendor Management, remarks, “Our partnership with Sungard means we could lose our own HQ building and the business would carry on as normal.”
Solution
- High Availability Hosting
- Intelligent Hands
- Managed Internet Bandwidth
- Workplace Recovery
- Project Management.
GTA relies on Sungard AS to host all of its live production systems at Sungard AS’s highly resilient London Technology Centre (LTC), retaining backup systems in-house. With Sungard AS managing centralised front and back end systems, including the all-important reservation system that handles up to 100 million searches a day, vice president, vendor management Tony Gavin is only half joking when he says, “If Sungard goes down, our business goes down.”
GTA’s offices around the world use the centralised systems hosted at Sungard AS, which include reservations, bookings, finance and email, to keep daily business operations running. Tony Gavin remarks, “With so much riding on continuous availability of our systems and data, knowing Sungard is behind us enables me to sleep at night. Having that level of reliability, security and expertise gives me tremendous peace of mind. It’s a benefit that is recognised beyond IT, throughout the management team.”
“Our partnership with Sungard means we could lose our own HQ building and the business would carry on as normal.” Tony Gavin, Vice President, Vendor Management, Kuoni Group IT
Among the vital systems hosted at LTC is an XML application that opens up GTA’s vast hotel inventory to travel retailers across the globe who perform constant searches of its database. Tony Gavin explains, “Searches come in through the Sungard pipe, into the infrastructure and out again around the clock without us knowing anything about it – and that’s just the way it should be.”
Although its recent change of ownership means GTA no longer has a statutory obligation to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation applicable to US companies, it continues to uphold SOX standards and, as an important part of its IT strategy, LTC is subject to regular third party audits. Tony Gavin notes, “We looked at various competitors at renewal time to compare what was out there but no one else could match Sungard’s infrastructure and service. Certainly, everyone we bring in to inspect the LTC facility is very impressed.”
