SunGard Availability Services officially joined the cloud computing game in early February when it launched Enterprise Cloud Services for North America, marking the start of a major private cloud offering.
“Our IaaS (infrastructure as a service) cloud solution is a natural extension of SunGard Availability Services’ traditional managed services offering and is under the managed services umbrella,” says Rob Walters, vice president of product management for SunGard Availability Services. The new cloud services are based upon the Vblock technology from VMware, Cisco Systems and EMC (VCE). The solution delivers managed compute, network, storage and security services via multi-tenant and dedicated private cloud set-ups.
In addition, SunGard is working with cloud monitoring specialist Nimsoft (which is now part of CA Technologies) to integrate Nimsoft’s Monitoring System (NMS) into the cloud platform and is making the monitoring tool available to Enterprise Cloud Services customers as a holistic offering, according to Tier1 research report.
SunGard Enterprise Cloud will be delivered via a data center in Philadelphia, which annually undergoes SAS 70 Type II audits and is a PCI DSS-compliant facility, and another location in Colorado will be available for customers as an alternative by the second quarter of this year, according to Tier1. “SunGard is planning to drive European platform convergence through integrating existing cloud platforms in Ireland (the company acquired Ireland-based Hosting 365 last year) and existing operations in the UK into one integrated Enterprise Cloud platform by Q2 2011.”
SunGard provides service level agreements (SLAs) with its new cloud services, offering 99.95 percent cloud infrastructure availability.
Most financial services firms prefer a private set-up with supporting services. The SunGard offering allows firms to send some of their IT workloads to the clouds and keep the rest internally.
Firms using the cloud still need a bullet-proof business continuity plan, administrative and security controls—a bevy of “the more humdrum requirements,” says Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of SunGard. Ignore the humdrum and firms may find themselves worse off than before especially if they move their data center to the clouds, he adds.
“If that data center goes down, unless you have made arrangements for the back-up or the shadowing of data … then you will find yourself in the same single point of dependency as if you were running a single data center with no back-up whatsoever,” Conde says.
Yet that scenario is more likely for those that opt for inexpensive, commoditized public cloud computing services.
“It’s fantastic if, let’s say, you’re a photography buff and you need to do a lot of renditions,” says Conde about public clouds. “You swipe your credit card, go to Amazon and you spin up 300 servers and get all that done. That’s fantastic but that’s not enterprise computing.”
SunGard also offers Cloud Readiness Assessment and Migration Services to ease customers into the cloud.
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