SunGard Availability Services offers managed recovery programme across Europe
Financial turmoil solutions
SunGard Availability Services, the information availability and business continuity arm of US-based IT services giant SunGard, said it has launched a fully managed recovery programme (MRP) across Europe designed for the recovery of complex IT environments.
The company, which has more than 9,000 customers across North America and Europe and five million square feet of data centre and operations space, says it has customers in virtually all industry and government sectors, selling through both direct sales and channel partners.
It notably bought UK rival Guardian iT in 2002 in a £56m takeover, integrating Guardian’s Heathrow technology hub at that time.
Complete recovery process
The new MRP goes beyond recovering customers’ infrastructure to manage the complete recovery process, including IT’s interaction with business requirements and production environments, SunGard said.
The programme manages every aspect of recovery from planning through to implementation and testing, balancing processes, design and continued service delivery while ring-fencing resources.
Keith Tilley, European vice president for SunGard AS, said the programme was designed with companies’ current financial turmoil in mind, allowing them to hand over the burden of recovery services and refocus their time and resources.
“The Managed Recovery Programme applies rigour to the recovery process, ring fences your resources and eliminates all the tiny trip and change points that can prevent you from achieving your recovery objectives,” Tilley stated.
As part of the programme SunGard assigns each customer a technical service delivery manager who works as an extension of the customer’s IT staff to coordinate implementation, testing and recovery management. The programme is designed around mutually agreed service level guarantees for aspects such as recovery time.
The programme includes definition and maintenance of recovery plans, recovery procedure execution, recovery management during disasters and post-test reporting.