When people turn 50, they sometimes do unusual things to celebrate the event. The Huffington Post published a list of things everyone should experience at least once when they hit the half-century mark: Try surfing. Take Tango lessons. Adopt a pet from a shelter. Camp on a remote beach in Greece. Go without internet for a month. See a Broadway show.
But for most, turning 50 is simply a time to reassess their purpose in life and embrace maturity. Even the ATM industry, which recently celebrated the 50th birthday of the ATM machine, commissioned a study by the ATM Industry Association to figure out how to reinvent itself. While the “next gen” ATM may look more like your smart phone, with almost half a million ATMs working in the U.S., it’s impossible to view the ATM as a thing of the past. Service, parts, security, branding and system management are paramount to today’s financial institutions offering ATMs to provide the best ROI.
Our goal to provide secure, robust service offerings in the financial industry led us to the most trusted name in disaster recovery, Sungard AS. By managing the migration of our key application to the AWS cloud leveraging Sungard AS’ Managed Services for production and recovery environments, Cennox obtained a level of resiliency we had not had previously benefited from.
This is where a company like Cennox comes in. Cennox is a global leader in banking and retail support services, with solutions ranging from technology services to specialised equipment and parts, security and alarm solutions, and branch transformation. Relied upon by the world’s leading financial institutions, Cennox is the partner of choice for thousands of banks, financial institutions, commercial operations and retail organisations. Think of Cennox as a “fountain of youth” for its clients.
Recognised for growth through acquisition and inward investment, Cennox is an industry pioneer with operations on six continents and central offices in the UK and U.S. With nearly three decades of experience in the fire and security alarm industries, Cennox gives its financial clients peace-of-mind by ensuring that theft detection systems are in good working order. The Cennox portfolio includes products that obstruct the criminal community that targets ATMs, and the company has already successfully eliminated ATM fraud from many of the worst hit machines.
To keep customer data secure from cyber breaches while conserving costs, Cennox turned to the AWS cloud (Amazon Web Services) for Enterprise Cloud Services, seeking maximum flexibility and security with an affordable footprint. So earlier this year when Cennox acquired 3SI Security Services’ European Division (a world leader in asset protection services), they wanted to convert them to the same AWS cloud services it uses to provide replication and recovery. Cennox tapped Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), a leading provider of critical production and recovery services to global enterprise companies, to migrate 3SI Security Services’ European Division to AWS.
Cennox engaged Sungard AS to migrate a critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application from their current virtual environment – which Sungard AS managed – to a Sungard AS managed environment on AWS, allowing consolidation of the environment to 20 percent of its previous footprint. Within four weeks and leveraging CloudEndure’s Live Migration technology, Sungard AS had converted the assets to the AWS cloud with a full management wrap.
“Our goal to provide secure, robust service offerings in the financial industry led us to the most trusted name in disaster recovery, Sungard AS. By managing the migration of our key application to the AWS cloud leveraging Sungard AS’ Managed Services for production and recovery environments, Cennox obtained a level of resiliency we had not had previously benefited from,” said Kevin Broughton, Chief Information Officer, Cennox.
Sungard AS had recently begun offering an upgraded, fully managed Cloud Recovery solution on AWS. This SLA (service level agreement)-backed recovery for customers, using AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), delivers the level of resiliency required for business-critical applications either on AWS or on premises. Customers can expect to achieve less than one-hour recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for their x86 workloads with the Sungard AS solution.
Sungard AS’ Managed AWS service for Cennox is hosted out of the Frankfurt region. The mission-critical ERP application’s workloads are further protected by Sungard AS’ Cloud Recovery – AWS service, underpinned by CloudEndure Disaster Recovery and Continuous Data Protection Technology ensuring the platform is replicated and available in the AWS Paris region at time of test or disaster.
High level solution design
Cennox Results
- Reduction in IT environment footprint by 80 percent
- Implementation of second site recovery solution delivering sub 1-hour RPO and RTO
- A 4-hour RTO Contracted SLA
- Continuity of service with Sungard AS – Managed AWS and Cloud Recovery – AWS across production and recovery environments.
Once the migration process was complete, Cennox was able to take a critical ERP application running on a single site enterprise cloud solution and not only migrate it to AWS quickly and successfully, but thereafter protect its workloads.
Following the merger of 3SI Security Services’ European Division, the Cennox IT team plans to leverage AWS going forward and is building their skills to develop an AWS practice in-house. By leveraging Sungard AS Managed AWS and Recovery services, Cennox can further protect its critical workloads worldwide. For financial institutions around the globe, this means not only exceptional service and agile response times but material cost savings. And when you serve the financial and banking industry, that means you practice what you preach.
Photo by Valdemars Magone on Unsplash