The JSA Group had long recognised the importance of availability to their business and realised its IT infrastructure was vulnerable to external threats. The social unrest that hit London and other major UK towns in the summer of 2011 was the catalyst to review its IT strategy and make its business more resilient.

Millions of people in Britain now work outside the PAYE system so employers and individuals look to firms like JSA for professional advice on their accountancy service needs. By offering a broad range of services for both umbrella and limited company contractors, JSA enables employers to make savings on their back office and resourcing costs while at the same time helping contractors remain compliant with HMRC guidelines.

With thousands of customers reliant on its payroll services being operational around the clock, JSA has zero tolerance for downtime.

Solution:
•  Cloud Consultancy
•  Infrastructure as a Service
•  Workplace Recovery
 
Business Benefits:
•  Ensures business as usual
•  Frees IT team to support the business
•  Preserves JSA’s reputation for reliability
•  Prevents customer defections
•  Peace of mind.

Read the full JSA Case Study

Watch the video case study

Business Challenge:
Ireland’s only government-accredited e-learning college provides post-graduate programmes for teaching professionals and others, delivering course content through online tutorials supplemented by practical classroom experience. With more than 8,000 students in 76 countries worldwide relying on Hibernia College’s award-winning blended learning programmes every year, its IT cannot fail.
 
Solution:
• Managed Multi-Tenanted Cloud Services.
 
Business Benefits:
• High levels of availability, backed by service guarantees
• Flexibility to manage sudden bursts in demand
• Resilient IT environment is a differentiator when competing for students
• Fully redundant infrastructure provides instant failover in the event of server failure
• Robust backup and recovery solution gives reassurance that no data will ever be lost
• Continuous data protection
• Supports Hibernia College’s business proposition of quality teaching and affordable fees
• Frees the in-house team to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management.

Read the full Hibernia College Case Study

Following a tender process, leading premium express delivery company City Link chose Sungard Availability Services as its  consulting and technology partner in a 3½ year, £2.5m deal to manage City Link’s cloud and managed services including its data centre.

Business Challenge:

When premium express parcel company City Link was sold by rentokil initial, it faced an immovable deadline to disengage its IT and communications infrastructure from its parent within just 12 months, after which it would incur punitive sanctions. It embarked on the search to find a technology partner able to implement a robust, resilient solution within the tight timescale imposed.

Solution:

•  Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) with failover to a secondary site
 

•  Cloud Consulting
 

•  Data Centre Transformation
 

•  Electronic Vaulting
 

•  Colocatio Services housing those servers unsuitable for virtualisation
 

•  Telephony Infrastructure provided through a dedicated, fully managed ESX box.

Click Here to read the full case study.

New Paper Sponsored by Sungard Availability Services Highlights Alignment Between CIO and Wider C-level Roles As Critical to Long-Term Success.

London, United Kingdom: 5 June, 2014 – Sungard® Availability Services™ (Sungard AS), a leading provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, announced today the publishing of a paper from Joe Peppard, professor of management at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. It reveals the unique opportunity that digitisation has provided for chief information officers (CIOs) to elevate their position and to drive the wider business agenda within their organisations. However, it also makes clear that the CIO can be held back by a lack of engagement – or people skipping IT out altogether – across the C-suite when it comes to technology, with strategic IT alignment remaining an afterthought for many organisations.

The paper, ‘Digital Dynamics in the C-Suite: Accelerating Digitisation with the Right Conversations’, sponsored by Sungard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability services, outlines how customer interactions and experiences are increasingly shaped by technology. It also identifies major shifts whereby the role of technology in business can be truly transformative and offers CIOs guidance to help them evolve, if not accelerate, their organisations’ digital agendas through digital cross-collaboration.

Some of the highlights from the paper are:

Fostering the right conversations – the opportunity for the CIO to lead
Despite recognising the organisation-wide disruption that ICT (information communications technology) and the rise of ‘digital first’ can bring, many at the C-level may not see identifying opportunities and optimising value from IT as a shared partnership but solely the CIO’s job. While this provides a unique opportunity for the CIO to elevate their role, it also presents challenges due to the digital illiteracy of some members of the C-suite and the ambiguous nature of the CIO role.

Senior business leaders tend to view IT as secondary when it comes to the overall business strategy, meaning that decision making is often siloed and not in line with the wider business objectives. The paper also outlines that many executives – who believe they are fairly tech savvy out of the workplace through the rise of internet enabled mobile devices – can make the mistake of equating consumer IT with enterprise IT, not quite understanding the complexities of ICT’s role within the business. As a result many organisations are making a less than optimal business decision where IT is concerned.

Increasing digital literacy and the changing role of the CIO
The paper recommends some considerations for CxOs to embrace the digitisation agenda, and not delegate solely to the CIO:

• Not knowing anything about ICT is no longer a badge of honor. And just because you are not in Generation Y is no excuse
• Recognise that technology can be a potent, if not vital, competitive weapon
• Keep abreast of the capabilities of new technologies: harness the CIO’s unique position as a business leader and technologist who can deliver valuable ongoing insights
• Partner with your CIO to map out the digital transformation agenda. Work together to identify tangible ways to further embed ICT in the business
• The greatest bottom line impacts may actually come from operational improvements
• Remember, the CIO spends money on behalf of the organisation for the achievement of benefits, so the budgeting process should reflect this
• Promote partnership with the lines of business, overcome resistance to change, and drive digital literacy across the organisation.

“Achieving collaborative working relationships between the CIO and the leadership team is necessary to harness digital opportunities and to optimise the value from ICT investments. However, at the moment, not enough organisations are adopting this approach, which is hindering their growth opportunities,” comments Joe Peppard, professor of management at the European School of Management and Technology.

Peppard continues: “Conversations must be two way if they are to encourage teams to spawn ideas that are enabled and shaped by IT, as well as help the CIO better understand the wider business priorities. Harnessed in the right way, these conversations will enable the CIO to not be seen as the office of ‘No’ and to become a more integrated part of the leadership team. ”

Keith Tilley, executive vice president, EMEA & APAC, Sungard Availability Services comments: “It has become increasingly evident that aligning people, processes and business availability should be seen as a strategic driver that helps to secure tangible business outcomes. However, collaboration is still too weak, with Sungard AS’ research revealing that only 42% of UK organisations breed a culture in which interdepartmental collaboration is actively encouraged. By increasing this collaborative mind-set across the remaining 58% of organisations, they can then start having the right conversations about information and technology that mirrors itself in the corporate strategy, and in turn where the company seeks to invest in the future.”

The paper also discusses how CIOs should recognise that Shadow IT – IT spending which happens without the IT department’s knowledge – is not necessarily a bad thing. With developments like cloud computing, it is much easier for employees or departments to bypass the IT team when availing IT capability. It discusses how it is often a sign of healthy innovation and actually presents a valuable opportunity for the CIO to work more closely with different business departments to develop new capabilities.

John Cridland, director-general, CBI states: “We live in a global economy where having effective digital skills and literacy is vital for any business wishing to have that cutting, competitive edge. CIOs and wider C-level roles need to work together to ensure that technology lies at the heart of the wider business strategy. This will help businesses take full advantage of the opportunities technology provides, which will keep them agile and responsive in today’s 24/7 business world.”

You don’t need to be a business or technology expert to see that cloud based computing is having a profound effect on some our working practices. It’s hard to overestimate the significance of this culture change: just as businesses needed to evolve by the introduction of the PC or the internet, the cloud represents another decade defining shift of evolution.

A Necessary Transition

Perhaps what is most interesting is that we’re seeing business ambitions start to outstrip the technology and services on offer – cloud is still in its nascent phase but we’re already visualising increasingly ambitious ways to apply the services delivered by cloud computing technology. Practices such as remote working, accessing work data from any device and allowing access to real-time data streams are only possible with cloud computing technology. And now, with mobile web usage set to outstrip desktop this year it’s clear that cloud adoption is more vital for businesses than ever before. While this new era of remote working is ostensibly a benefit for organisations, with employees enjoying greater levels of productivity than previously, this new way of working requires a robust and flexible IT infrastructure that is underpinned with a strong secure, resilient foundation.

So what transformations can we expect to see now that cloud technology is becoming an IT essential (rather than a competitive edge)? For a start the cloud has substantial implications for every organisation’s operational efficiency. The advantages of on-demand cloud services have been talked up to the point of excess, but a reduction in IT maintenance costs, increased automation, rapid scalability, a simplified IT framework and the movement from CapEx to OpEx are all real benefits for any business. Put simply: a business can now run its entire infrastructure more efficiently and for a lower cost.

A Chance for Innovation

While each organisation is on its own cloud journey the technology is already having a big impact on the role of IT within an organisation. The nature of the cloud means IT departments can shift their focus, taking IT from being an unavoidable cost centre to being an epicentre for value creation. Through the cloud CIOs can now drive value for the organisation, developing innovative applications delivered within a Software as a Service (SaaS) framework, whether that’s to support employees or external stakeholders, (e.g. customers and partners), that will help open up previously untapped business opportunities. Cloud allows businesses to offer instant access to data and services for both employees and customers alike – something that has become increasingly essential in today’s ‘always-on’ society.

With organisations poised to invest significantly over the next three to five years in refreshing their IT infrastructure, there is a real opportunity for senior IT decision-makers to set out their stall and demonstrate the tangible benefits IT can deliver to the organisation.

Increased Flexibility, Greater Control

Amidst this revolutionary change, there are new challenges for the CIO in attempting to govern their organisation’s data flow. The increase in flexible working has transformed the CIO focus from attempting to control individual devices to monitoring how users are accessing the organisation’s data. CIOs can now manage their organisation’s entire infrastructure from a single, centralised location. This means growing a business becomes much simpler as end-users can be added to system quickly, no matter their location – with such minimal set up costs businesses can afford to be bolder when expanding into new markets

The case for cloud is starting to now be won, business are no longer asking “why cloud?” but “How do I get there?” It’s a pivotal era for IT and one where the most creative and innovative organisations, rather than their conservative counterparts, are going to thrive and emerge from this period of austerity stronger than ever.

Though for all the discussion of new working practices and innovative ways to drive value and revenue across the business, cloud adoption may come down to simple economics. Attempting to bury your head in the sand and writing cloud off as a fad is comparable to a business investing in typewriters rather than mobile devices. Ultimately, cloud based computing has come so far that you can now run entire business processes, on a resilient platform that offers unprecedented levels of availability for your enterprise, at a fraction of the previous price.

All roads lead to the cloud, some may take longer than others but isn’t it about time to check you’re on the right route for your organisation.

This article first appeared in Fresh Business Thinking 21/5/14: http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/business_advice.php?AID=12700#.U32p0fldUgA

Now in its 14^th year of running, the Tech Excellence awards are viewed as Ireland’s “principal badge of honour in the IT Industry” and recognise the very best companies who are striving to implement the technology solutions which have a real impact on business growth.

Those nominated for the Managed Service Company of the Year award have been selected as examples of best practice within the industry, supplying their entire customer base with good-governance and best-of-breed security offerings.

At Sungard AS we are proud to be recognised alongside other leading companies in the sector. With our presence in Ireland continuing to grow, this nomination serves as an excellent recognition for the work we have done so far.

Our work with Transics – a leading fleet management solution provider – is a great example. Transics chose to run its mission critical IT out of our base in Ireland and needed a technology partner with a proven track record and a global standard of managed services. Transics was also looking for increased availability and agility of its service for existing customers while allowing the company to scale up in line with its growth plans – all of which we Sungard AS has enabled.

Finally, with our recent independence from SunGard Data Systems this award signifies industry confidence in Sungard AS’ ability to provide a world-class managed availability solution.

Here at Sungard AS Ireland we are immensely proud of the work we’ve done and the value we have and will continue to deliver for our customers in today's business world where everything is all-time.

Companies now recognise they cannot afford to be unavailable for any significant period of time – customers will simply go to a competitor – and, consequently, organisations are becoming ever more aggressive with their availability and recovery goals.   Adding to the challenge, globalisation means today businesses need to recover on a wider geographic scale than ever before.  

There are many reasons why organisations fail to meet high availability and recovery targets – among them lack of resources, skills, testing and plans  – but one of the most common problems is IT disaster recovery plans being out of sync with the production environment.  This is perhaps unsurprising when with today’s complex production environments just one change a month per system can result in more than 10,000 configuration changes before each annual test.

In addition, the majority of organisations focus testing on recovering IT systems rather than recovering business services and applications, creating a potential shortfall in meeting stakeholder exepctations when recovery is for real.

Last year, we developed our Managed Recovery Programme (MRP) to help organisations align their recovery plans to their business continuity objectives and provide the skills and resources to fully document the recovery processes and undertake the recovery during testing and invocation.  This service enables organisations to focus their valuable resources on their production environment.

The underlying philosophy of the service is to recover customers’ business processes and applications, not just their servers and reduce downtime to the absolute minimum.  We recognised that by applying our Business and ICT Continuity expertise, as well as our experience of performing recoveries and managing critical systems, we could remove unnecessary pain points while giving customers the assurance of achieving an application recovery time to an SLA.

But MRP is not just for those customers who experience problems.  Regular testing is vital – whether to comply with regulatory or audit requirements or provide stakeholder reassurance – but it can be costly, time-consuming and takes resources away from running production projects the business depends on.  For this reason, MRP can benefit all types of organisation, not only those that have experienced the headaches and expense of a difficult test or recovery as we can run the tests on their behalf.  Here are some of the reasons why MRP is proving an attractive proposition for many companies:

• Plugs skills gaps and people shortages – tests can be planned but an invocation occurs without warning. Our onsite recovery specialists perform successful recoveries week in, week out – not once or twice a year.
• The reassurance of 24/7 service availability – and compliance statements for regulatory or audit purposes.
• Backed by service level agreements.
• Allows the testing budget to be ringfenced.
• Reduces the risk of tests being cancelled due to staff shortages or business priorities, which only increases the likelihood of future failures.
• Lessens dependence on the skills and knowledge of individual employees/contractors, which creates a vacuum when they leave.
• Eliminates the issues that typically frustrate the recovery process – the MRP change management process ensures the recovery environment stays in sync with production and remains aligned to business recovery objectives.
• Frees up staff to focus on projects that add value to the business – People cost money: Could their time be better spent concentrating on the production environment rather than testing? Using MRP to undertake routine tasks can be more cost-efficient.
• Automates elements of recovery through the use of toolsets for critical applications.

So how does MRP work in practice?  MRP is delivered following a 10 stage ITIL-based process. From the start, Sungard AS deploys an MRP team to work with the customer to review existing practices and develop a recovery solution that will deliver against the business recovery objectives. A complete set of ITIL-focused processes and documentation is produced so that at time of test or invocation Sungard AS is in a position to recover the customer’s environment, to the agreed level of service, allowing them to concentrate on their core activities.

Service design and onboarding

This first stage is a recovery information gathering exercise that starts with a workshop involving core management team and technicians to enable SunGard to fully understand the application landscape and assess the requirements of a recovery solution.  We then start developing a recovery solution and associated plans and procedures to meet the business continuity objectives.

Service transition

Following the initial set of documentation we conduct a Procedure Verification Test in partnership with the customer to verify that all the knowledge gained, documentation produced and solution implemented are all valid and proven. It’s about proving we are able to achieve the customer’s objectives before moving on to an SLA-backed managed recovery service.

Service operation

The service now moves into the ‘business as usual’ state whereby the operations teams conduct tests, and recover applications on a client’s behalf.  We embed ourselves into the client change management process in order to manage change control throughout the life of the contract, maintain recovery documentation and conduct regular reviews with key stakeholders to ensure contract schedules are aligned, services are up-to-date and that the recovery strategy continues to meet the changing needs of the business.

To find out how HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd benefitted from MRP, click here. 

Coming as it does within days of Sungard Availability Services becoming independent of SunGard Data Systems, the award signifies industry confidence in Sungard AS’ focus on providing world-class managed availability solutions of which cloud is a key aspect.

The award, which highlights Sungard AS’ expertise in operating data centers and leveraging Cisco’s Powered Cloud Services, further confirms Sungard AS’ position as one of the leading cloud services provider within the industry. Over the past year Sungard AS has been focused on transforming its cloud relationship with Cisco to offer services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service and cloud solutions which are aligned with customers’ business priorities and helping them fulfill tangible business outcomes. Weekly joint pipeline and account review meetings with the Cisco Management team has ensured partnering of the highest quality, and has expanded its business strategy to take the Cloud Services offering to market through a number of Cisco Cloud Reseller Partners. This has resulted in the generation of a rapidly expanding Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud pipeline for the company.

Commenting on the awards, Keith Tilley, EVP, EMEA & APAC, Sungard Availability Services, said: “We are delighted to have received recognition of the great results we’ve seen so far. Not only is our partnership with Cisco beneficial to Sungard AS as a business, but it also allows us to provide a comprehensive and high quality service to our own end-users and the wider Cisco customer-base, who need to operate in an all-time market.”

“This award also recognises and symbolises the strength of Sungard AS as a standalone organisation; having recently split-off from SunGard Data Systems, we will be looking to further build our own partner relationships within the market and focus on those solutions which will help accelerate our ability to meet the growing availability needs of our customers on a global basis to help them deliver the outcomes they need within today’s all-time business world.”

John Ferguson, head of managed services, CashFac explains, “Our customer onboarding process would sometimes take weeks – now it’s a matter of days for a new customer and we can rapidly scale up resources to meet additional demand on the infrastructure.”

“I liked the combination of having local account management but also working with a provider that has national and international reach,” comments John Ferguson. “We have customers in the Asia Pacific region and it is useful to know SunGard has a strong presence in the US and across Europe to support our growth plans.”

CashFac is now reaping all the benefits of an outsourced service. “SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Service has taken away the headaches of having to manage and monitor infrastructure,” John Ferguson remarks. “Because of SunGard we are now in a strong position to build this side of the business and react so much more quickly to market changes or customer demands.”

As for the burgeoning relationship between the two companies, he says, “I’ve found the SunGard people I’ve dealt with very helpful and professional. They’ve gone out their way to understand our business and I very much view it as a long-term partnership.”

SunGard Availabilitty Services selected:

•          Enterprise Cloud Services
•          Data Vaulting

You can read the full story for yourself here.

London, UK – SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability services, today announced that leading European fleet management solutions provider, Transics, has selected SunGard to provide a high performance hosted environment to optimise the agility, flexibility and reliability of its solution. By deploying a broad range of Managed Services and Hybrid Cloud Services, Transics offers its customers an even more stable, robust and available infrastructure into which they can both entrust  and secure their mission critical data.

Based in Belgium, Transics operates worldwide specialising in fleet management solutions for the transport and logistics sector. The heart of its solution, the market-leading TX-CONNECT, is a back-office software which helps carriers manage their trucks, drivers, trailers, cargo and orders more efficiently, thus helping to raise productivity while trimming costs.  This is achieved via on-board computers which feed real-time data directly to customers worldwide. To support its growth and future innovation Transics was keen to ensure that its technology partner had a proven track record, could offer a global standard of managed services and deliver a hosting platform that would not only improve the availability and agility of the service for existing customers, but also be able to scale up quickly and efficiently in line with its growth plans.

“We had three key objectives for selecting a technology partner,” comments Koen Uyttenhove, vice president – customer services, Transics. “Our partner had to have a strong global presence and reputation, the ability to deliver a solution that could provide tangible ROI and finally, they had to genuinely understand the business and be able to offer a high level of day-to-day technical support. In the end, SunGard was the perfect choice.”

Since working with SunGard Availability Services, Transics is now able to offer customers improved performance levels, with greater reliability and resilience built into its infrastructure. Additionally, the business has seen a significant saving in IT costs, allowing resources that were previously directed towards maintaining the IT environment to now be used to drive revenue elsewhere in the organisation.

“Partnering with a globally recognised managed services player such as SunGard has had a positive impact across the entire organisation,” added Uyttenhove. “The stability of the platform has been exceptional and we’ve never experienced anything but 100 per cent uptime. We’ve even seen an increase in new business, as customers and prospects feel their vital data is now more safe and secure. Additionally, the deal has helped us future proof our IT estate as we are able to scale up our computing power quicker to accommodate new customers within the system – helping us grow the business at a faster rate.”  

“Ambitious and fast growing companies such as Transics require a technology solution that can offer business impact, both instantly and in the long-term,” comments Keith Tilley, executive vice president, EMEA & APAC, SunGard Availability Services. “With SunGard supporting its underlying infrastructure, Transics can now switch its focus away from maintenance issues to channel time, focus and resources into optimising the range of solutions available for customers, streamline its back-office and ultimately increase its bottom line.”

All of SunGard Availability Services’ solutions are underpinned by its strength of heritage which spans five decades of delivering Information Availability. By combining this experience to work in partnership with customers, SunGard helps them to harness their people, their processes and their technology to optimise their business outcomes and competitiveness.