“We have zero tolerance for downtime. Quite simply, we would be out of business within 24 hours.”
Liam Coyle
managing director, iSeek.ie

Read the full iSeek.ie case study on the SunGard website

Key findings:

• More than 1 in 5 UK adults would skive off work to watch a live event
• Over a third (38%) of employers in UK organisations admit  they will not, or are unsure as to whether or not they will, discipline staff if they take unauthorised leave during this summer’s Games
• Less than a quarter (22%) of staff feel their employer is prepared for possible organisation disruption during the Olympics

London, UK – 30 April 2012: UK organisations are struggling to cope with Olympics staffing challenges, as many employees (21%) are willing to take unauthorised time off to watch high profile events. Even the risk of being caught is not a deterrence, and UK bosses admit that almost a third of skivers are likely to go unpunished.

Research sponsored by SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, reveals only 22% of workers think their organisation is prepared for disruption brought about by the Olympic Games and only 9% have received communication on flexible working policies for this time. With almost a third (31%) of employees expecting holiday packages, new technology devices and flexible working hours to be introduced to their working life, organisations will likely be stretched and in a state of flux as it is – without counting the potential cost of employee absenteeism.

“Now is the time for UK companies to act,” advises Keith Tilley, UK&I managing director and executive vice president for Europe, SunGard Availability Services. “Keeping workers content is the number one priority to encourage productivity and ensure business continues as usual. It’s a hugely exciting time, and there’s no reason employees have to abandon ship to enjoy it. Simple actions such as installing communal TVs, and allowing employees time to view high profile events will help ensure businesses remain productive without damaging office morale and may even boost it.  Today’s technologies mean companies have more resources at their disposal than ever before to keep things going, so there’s no need for staff or the business to miss out.”

However putting these plans in place is only half the battle, Tilley continues: “Communication is the key factor in planning for any disruption. Outlining expectations and educating staff on continuity plans will lay the essential groundwork for continued productivity during the Games, and offers a chance to fine tune working practices for future planned and unplanned incidents.”  

For business looking to cope with the challenges from this summer and beyond SunGard has developed a 10 step guide, available for download at http://www.sungard.co.uk/Documents/10_step_guide.pdf.

On the morning of the 27th February a major fire broke out in the fuel storage cells of the Tilbury Power Station. The blaze caused substantial damage, the full extent of which is still being assessed, and rendered the facility out of commission for the foreseeable future.

It's an unfortunate reality that incidents do happen and as the recent and unexpected blaze at the Tilbury Power Station shows: it's impossible to tell what's around the corner. A serious disaster, however, does not need to mean the end of business as usual operations. If companies are able to react quickly and effectively to mitigate the damage, the majority of businesses can quickly recover and go on to thrive.

As the Tilbury Power Station staff work to try and get back to business as usual, we ask what the business continuity and disaster recovery industries can learn from this episode?

In the aftermath of any serious incident, companies can be hampered by prolonged and far-reaching disruption. While many companies predicate their planning on the swift resolution of an incident the reality is that even short-lived events can result in pro-longed disruption and impact for a significant period of time.

This applies not only to the organisation at the centre of an incident but, as we've seen with Tilbury Power Station, also for those in the surrounding area, customers, partners etc. While it is tempting for business continuity plans to be predominantly internally focused on what problems can occur within the organisation, it is all too common that the threat and disruption could come from an external source. There needs to be a shift in how organisations assess disruption risks to factor in all potential eventualities.

Additionally, by ensuring that their business continuity plan was communicated to all staff in a plain and unambiguous way, Tilbury Power Station's owner, RWE npower, was able ensure that all staff were evacuated safely. Business continuity plans must be shared widely throughout the organisation to maximise their effectiveness.

A recent survey conducted by SunGard Availability Services found that disruption is now a way of life for UK organisations and their workers. The past couple of years have seen a wide variety of disruptions to UK businesses such as unforeseen snow and public sector strikes and the research found that as a result 59 per cent of organisations factor more disruptions into operational plans.

An incident like the Tilbury Power Station fire will undoubtedly present challenges and inspire chaos and confusion for the surrounding businesses. Those organisations which are able to return to business as usual quickest will be the ones whose employees completely understand their roles in the recovery plan.

The incident at Tilbury demonstrates the importance of organisations having in place a comprehensive business continuity programme which can provide a strong framework for coping with all eventualities, whether they originate within or are external to the organisation. Clear channels of communication between employer and employee are vital in ensuring a swift return to business as usual.

A well thought out continuity and availability strategy should allow an organisation to adapt to all manner of unique and challenging situations in order to limit downtime, safeguard the relationship between company and customer and as such maintain their 'available enterprise' status.

SunGard’s cloud solutions, including Enterprise Cloud Services, are delivered on a highly available and secure cloud infrastructure. SunGard cloud solutions are a suite of compute, network and storage resources delivered on a resilient cloud infrastructure.  SunGard’s Cloud services are pre-integrated and delivered on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS).

“Cisco is proud to partner with so many well-respected and industry-leading organisations, and it is an honour to recognise SunGard Availability Services as a Cisco Partner Summit theatre award winner,” said Jim Sherriff, senior vice president, Americas Partner Organization at Cisco.  “The Cloud Partner of the Year award presented to SunGard recognises its performance and expertise as a Cisco channel partner in 2011.”

“The Cisco Cloud Partner of the Year award is strong validation for SunGard’s Cloud strategy of providing secure, fully managed offerings for production and recovery,” said Rob Walters, vice president of product management, SunGard Availability Services.  “Delivering our solutions on premium Cisco UCS infrastructure is essential to us in providing highly available cloud services.”

SunGard is a certified Cisco Cloud Provider to offer Cisco Powered IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) Cloud, which recognises SunGard’s delivery of exceptional cloud services in a multi-tenant environment to end customers.  SunGard is also certified as a Cisco Master Managed Services Channel Partner, which designates SunGard’s Cloud offerings as meeting the highest level of achievement for partners delivering Cisco technologies as a managed solution.

Cisco Partner Summit awards are presented at three levels: global, geo, and theatre.  Cisco Partner Summit US and Canada theater awards reflect a partner’s performance in a given geographic region of the United States or Canada.    SunGard’s Cloud-based IaaS offerings are currently available across North America and Europe.

With the strike potentially slowing up business as usual operation in the London area in particular, Keith Tilley, expert in business continuity and disaster recovery services from SunGard Availability Services, reviews what steps businesses can take to ensure minimal disruption and what could be learnt ahead of the Olympics:

“Disruption has now become a way of life for modern businesses and today’s corporate calendars are littered with obstacles to everyday operations. All manner of issues, ranging from planned disruptions such as the Olympics to unforeseeable events like the upcoming strike, can potentially cause problems for UK businesses.

"Recent research from SunGard Availability Services has found that 59 per cent of organisations now factor in more disruptions to their operational plans than ever before. In this case, it’s vital that businesses are able to keep the apace of their competitors and don’t lose any time to disruptions such as these. Forward thinking businesses should look, where possible, to enable and communicate plans to support staff to work remotely during disruptions, rather than face the inevitable loss in productivity caused by staff inability to access or use their usual offices and resources, plus the inevitable uncertainty on what action to take.

“Major disruption can have a long-reaching ripple effect throughout the supply chain, not simply due to the initial costs but in terms of reputation management, customer satisfaction and partner relationships. Years of trust can be wiped out by supply chain vulnerabilities. Clearly businesses need to understand the importance of investing in business resilience and a comprehensive continuity plan."

Visit the SunGard Availability Services website for more information about Business Continuity.

So with finance frequently involved in sanctioning IT expenditure, it’s no surprise that CIOs and CFOs have often had a troubled relationship.

As cloud computing starts to become part of companies’ IT strategies, what effect has this had on the CIO/CFO relationship? Do the views between the CIO and CFO remain opposing? Is this conflict holding up adoption of the technology? And what is needed for both parties to capitalise on its potential benefits? Let’s explore…

I recently conducted two pieces of research with Vanson Bourne – the first surveying 100 CFOs, the second reaching out to 250 CIOs. Within these, a sense of conflict between today’s CFOs and CIOs did emerge – specifically in the finding that 42 per cent of CIOs said it was their CFO colleagues that were opposed to a move to the cloud.

Steve Lea, my CFO, responds to this by stating that CIOs are frequently seen as only being interested in innovation and new technologies, with the financial implications largely an afterthought. The CFO is not overtly opposed to new technologies like cloud computing, but has to view any investment from the perspective of the company’s bottom line.

Dave Gilpin, my CIO, maintains that the responsibility of the CIO is to take a visionary approach – to overlook immediate, potentially minor merits in favour of longer-term, more substantial business investment. Gilpin also admits that CIOs can thrive on the glory associated with driving innovation – of sourcing and investing in something that brings about major change to an organisation, and being seen as the one person taking the business in exciting new directions.

It’s a different mindset to the CFO, one traditionally driven by the less high-profile, ongoing ambition to manage costs and keep a healthy financial bottom line. His view is that this can cause friction with the CFO’s continual focus on delivering more immediate cost savings.

However, the prospect of manageable lower costs, delivered through buying only what you need when you need it, is something that CFOs and CIOs could both get behind.

What also became clear from the research was that the CIOs and CFOs surveyed share many mutual priorities and concerns with regards to cloud computing. Such an opportunity brings with it a change of habit: in traditional models, technology is bought for a project, which will be expensive to use at the outset, but lower over time as the resources become fully utilised.

Perhaps as a result of pressure from the CFOs, research suggests that many CIOs do have cost-cutting front of mind from the outset, and that reducing expenses is one of three most pressing challenges they feel need resolving today. Feedback from CFO respondents, meanwhile, undermines the perception of them as solely worrying about financial aspects of investment.

Ensuring data is secure is paramount; in fact three times as many CFOs are looking for “a solid record of resilience and protecting of a customer’s data” rather than “impressive ROI” stats when selecting a cloud provider.

Security and the safety of data is a major issue for both parties, with over half (56 per cent) of CFO respondents citing fears around the security of sensitive customer or commercial data and only 15 per cent admitting to being happy to outsource all of their data.

That said, Steve Lea believes that CFOs need to realise that much of their data is already in the cloud; they may just not fully realise it – payroll is a classic example but there are countless other outsourced activities common to companies of today.

68 per cent of CIOs, meanwhile, are only happy to outsource data which is not critical or sensitive and only 10 per cent are “completely confident” in the security and resilience of third party cloud solutions. CIOs are demanding cloud providers to demonstrate greater clarity and visibility in their capabilities in the areas of data protection (71 per cent) and data security (66 per cent).

The hype of the cloud is also uniting the CIO and CFO, deterring them from embracing this technology, or at least creating reservations around diving headfirst into it. As many as 86 per cent of CIOs think cloud computing is overhyped, for example, while the high-profile nature of recent cloud outages from major service providers is understandably heightening CFO fears around this technology – with nearly half (45 per cent) of the CFO respondents admitting that such cases make them more inclined to keep their data in-house, despite the cost implications.

Steve Lea, builds on this, stating that the word ‘cloud’ itself is one that’s vague and ambiguous, and that this terminology helps put CFOs off from the technology associated with it.

With CFOs and CIOs in fact sharing many concerns regarding cloud computing, it stands to reason that informed, appropriate steps can be taken to help address the issues both parties face. Information is the starting point vendors need to look to. The research found that only 34% of CFOs admit to fully understanding the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Dave Gilpin echoes this, stating that, in reality, the majority of executives do not yet know someone that has made a major transition to the cloud – meaning the decision to move to the cloud or not is often a judgement call, rather than one based on first-hand experience or insight.

Vendors need to address quickly the limited number of C-level executives that fully understand this technology, as many are demanding clarity on specific points. Providing greater insight on cloud offerings will enable CIOs and CFOs to make a better investment for their companies, based on what the solution can do for their specific needs. It will also help cut through the hype surrounding cloud computing, taking the conversation away from the media landscape and into the boardroom of each business.

Ultimately, even if they may appear to take different approaches, the end objectives of the CIO and CFO revolve around making worthwhile investments, delivering ROI and driving business productivity. Technology like cloud computing does have the very real potential to match these criteria. It’s now a matter of bridging the disconnect that lies between the available offerings and the perception of the decision makers within organisations. With the correct proof points in place, the politics and tensions within any business can be put aside in favour of innovation that will drive the company forward.

For more information on Cloud Infrastructure click here

The study, which looks at the underlying causes of businesses calling on SunGard to action its Business Continuity, Technology Recovery or Workplace Recovery arrangements, uncovered evidence that the increased adoption of cloud computing means that a company’s mission critical data can now be resilient to all but the most catastrophic disruptions. As invocations due to hardware dropped by nearly a third it’s apparent that cloud computing and other managed availability services have delivered businesses unprecedented levels of hardware resilience.

The recent rise in power, (up by 33 per cent since last year) and communication failures, coupled with the reduction in hardware issues, demonstrates exactly how business continuity practices continue to evolve with the changing landscape of technology. However, while the transition to the cloud has increased data availability it has also placed business communications systems in a much more integral role than ever before. As the statistics show, too many businesses are still leaving themselves at risk of disruption by not investing in a truly resilient ICT infrastructure. The cloud can form a vital part in minimising disruption but its utility rests entirely on the strength and resilience of an organisation’s communications infrastructure, which includes diverse and separate links and hubs,  to remove the single points of failure that leave businesses vulnerable.

With impending events such as the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee, UK businesses will inevitably find their resources stretched throughout 2012. The Olympic Games will also mean a huge influx of people into the capital, placing further strain on the UK’s power grid and communication networks. Without substantial business continuity planning many organisations risk downtime and data loss. In a separate study, our research has also revealed an overwhelming disconnect between businesses and employee when it comes to Olympic continuity planning, discovering that although four out of five businesses claim to have made plans for the Olympics only  22 per cent of employees actually know what these policies are. It seems that once again, when it comes to continuity planning, many organisations are simply not taking the issues seriously enough.  

With last year’s Invocation report showing that not only  will the workplace never be completely immune to disruption, but is actually a growing source of interruption, organisations can take heart that they can take positive steps to maintain staff productivity.  With such a challenging year ahead it is essential organisations that start to prepare themselves as exhaustively as possible. With the investments we are making across the industry, we are seeing the positive impact of proactive technology management upon IT outages – companies can also look to exploit virtualised solutions to keep their people up and running too.

The overall number of invocations represents the lowest incidence of downtime our customers have seen in fourteen years, but the top reasons for failure remain stubbornly consistent, suggesting that there is still work to be done within UK organisations to put strong business continuity programmes in place.

It’s essential that UK businesses, particularly those in London (where 90% of power disruptions occurred) and the UK’s other major business conurbations are adequately prepared and continue to make a valuable contribution to the formation of continuity best practice.   All of which are fundamental to the creation of an available enterprise.

SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leader in Information Availability, today announced the introduction of Managed Workflow – a further enhancement to the built-in resilience of SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services. Managed Workflow allows customers to modify all aspects of their cloud environments, as business needs dictate, through a dedicated portal – including infrastructure modifications, the addition of new virtual machines or storage, changes to firewall policy and the support of new business applications. This will help proactively reduce the risk and exposure associated with making system changes to live cloud environments.

As businesses increasingly rely on their IT resources to help drive efficiencies and bottom-line success, all system upgrades require safeguards against avoidable outages.  Managed Workflow combines IT automation with the availability experience of SunGard’s global team of cloud experts: each change request is analysed and any required recommendations to help ensure infrastructure availability or integrity made.  Customers can then proceed confident that new cloud services are both rapidly provisioned whilst delivering maximum business value.  

“There is a need in certain, non-critical cloud environments, for instant response to change requests in an environment.  However, the evaluation of a change request is vital for live production environments, where a system change can create a problem that may take down the entire infrastructure,” said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.  “Having a global team of skilled, quality engineers reviewing proposed cloud changes brings great value to cloud customers.  The approach enables SunGard to apply the knowledge gained from managing its cloud deployments to help ensure any change produces a successful result.”

The Managed Workflow portal also enables customers to view the entire change review and execution, with SunGard committing to a two-hour service level agreement to review every change request to a customer’s production cloud environment. In addition, customers will have the opportunity to view or manage non-managed virtual machines within their cloud environment, providing means for managing less critical systems, testing & development, and non-production applications. Customers can remotely log into these virtual machines and perform a wide variety of administrative tasks such as restarting a VM or applying a patch. 

Keith Tilley managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services comments: “In today’s hugely competitive business landscape, companies expect on-demand access to IT management to deliver the resources they need exactly when they need it. These changes, however, must be thoroughly and professionally reviewed, especially when dealing with live operating environments where failure equates to exposure and the potential for high profile downtime.”

SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services offer managed availability and security of compute, network and storage resources, delivering higher levels of efficiency and availability for customer productions. With the option of managed multi-site recovery, SunGard customers can access a secondary cloud site for recovery – operational within four hours – should the primary cloud site experience an outage. SunGard provides customers with an SLA of 99.95 percent infrastructure uptime measured by device.

More information:

• To download a Cloud Services brief on the SunGard Enterprise Cloud, authored by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), please click here
• To watch a video with Hugh Scott, Chief Information Officer at Energy Plus discuss how SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud has helped his live cloud production environments, please click here

SunGard experts provide a fully-managed recovery service to help client organisations lower the costs, burden and risk within their recovery processes.  SunGard also establishes with its customers mutually agreed upon service level guarantees for certain aspects of the services.  including recovery time and point objectives. Applying SunGard’s extensive recovery expertise enables organisations to re-focus their time and resources to create value at the application and production level.

SunGard’s Managed Recovery Programme goes beyond infrastructure to proactively manage the complete recovery process and its interaction with business requirements and production environments. From planning through to implementation and testing, the programme manages every aspect of the recovery journey balancing processes, design, continued service delivery, and ring-fencing resources.  The Managed Recovery Programme addresses the challenges of change management as unchecked these can compromise overall business resilience.  

Keith Tilley, managing director UK&I and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services comments: “Businesses are increasingly having to balance the quandary of budget cuts, headcount restrictions and widespread expectations for optimal IT delivery to support ‘always on’ availability. As disruptions become a way of life for European businesses, organisations need a combination of resilient IT production services and recovery, which integrates and manages the infrastructure and creates the optimal model for business availability.”

Borne out of over thirty years of helping enterprises of all types and sizes remain available, SunGard’s programmatic approach helps customers identify and address root cause recovery pain points, such as change management for  recovery plans and procedures, staff availability, and the skill levels needed to support testing and recovery activities. For each customer, SunGard assigns a technical service delivery manager who works as a seamless extension to the client’s own internal IT staff to coordinate the take-on process,testing activities and the management of the recovery lifecycle.

To help ensure successful application recovery the Managed Recovery Programme includes:

• Definition and maintenance of recovery plans, procedures and recovery infrastructure configurations;
• Recovery procedure execution including startup of operating system, network and backup servers;
• Recovery management during disasters; and
• Post-test reporting including detailed review of test activities, gap analysis, recommendations for improvements, remediation plans, program status reporting, contract maintenance and updates.

Tilley concludes: “Organisations are struggling to manage the recovery process and the demands it applies to resilience in both production and services. 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.”

The firm would have needed to buy two net attached storage arrays costing at least £50,000 and David Little, head of IT and investment operations for Liontrust, explains, “It would have been completely illogical to buy another physical server or storage device. The cloud is the natural solution to capacity issues.”

SunGard Availability Services worked closely with Liontrust to develop a hybrid solution incorporating both physical and virtual environments to meet its specific business needs. As a customer of 13 years standing, Liontrust’s confidence was such that it placed all its core systems in SunGard’s private cloud infrastructure including its vital research database, trading platform and business email.

After all, as David Little notes, “The concept of enterpriseclass cloud computing may be relatively new but the underlying infrastructure is SunGard’s bread and butter. We trust their expertise and resources.”

Almost immediately, Liontrust saw the benefits of enhanced flexibility when following its takeover of Occam Asset Management, it was able to seamlessly accommodate a 50% increase in users without any hassle or additional cost. David Little notes, “In the past if we needed to provision a new server it could take months and cost thousands of pounds. Now it takes a couple of days and there are no additional costs.”

The checks and controls built into SunGard’s IaaS have also relieved some of Liontrust’s compliance burden and security concerns. David Little comments, “The fact that SunGard’s IaaS proposition is a private cloud was important to us as it gives us all the cloud benefits without the security risks of a public cloud.”

The transition took place over a six-month period and IT manager Paul Mathanarajah reports “User perceptions have been pretty good with no complaints and our customers are unaware that our IT infrastructure has changed at all, which is just the way it should be.”

Read the case study here