AVAILABILITY NOW A SOURCE OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

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Welcome to the spring issue of AVAIL in which our lead story talks about how availability is no longer just “an IT thing” but a tangible source of competitive advantage. It’s not simply about technology uptime and downtime but, increasingly, about having an IT infrastructure that can perform and adapt at the speed of the business.

We bring you exciting news of Sungard AS developments to help organisations achieve availability by supporting flexible working and improving organisational resilience. These include a new dedicated workplace recovery facility in Wroclaw, Poland, a town fast becoming the BPO capital of Europe, and the imminent launch of Virtual Desktop, a fully managed workforce enablement service.

Elsewhere, our feature on Sungard AS’s Managed Recovery Programme (MRP) explains why the service isn’t only for companies that experience problems with testing or recovery but for any organisation that wants to make more productive use of their employees’ time.

We are pleased to announce that Andrew Barber, most recently Chief Information Security Officer at Xchanging has joined Sungard AS as Chief Security Officer (CSO) for the EMEA & APAC regions. Watch out for the official meet and greet in the next edition of AVAIL!

We now have a distinctive new brand to mark our separation from our former parent, SunGard Data Systems on 31 March 2014. You might be wondering how, if at all, this will affect your company and the answer is from a customer viewpoint it is very much `business as usual’. You can be confident we will continue with our strategy, investment plans and portfolio of services delivered by the  same highly trained, well motivated workforce. This is a hugely positive step for us as we see significant benefits in the sharp strategic focus that independence will bring, helping us serve you, our valued customers, even better.
As always, I hope you enjoy this issue and my team welcomes feedback on any aspect of the magazine. Just send your comments to the editor at infoavail@sungardas.com

 

Gary Watson
General Manager Ireland

INFORMATION AVAILABILITY: A KEY SOURCE OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

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“Availability” means different things to different people. For many, it connotes maintaining business as usual, or resilience to known or unknown disruptions – the traditional BC/DR mind-set. But in today’s terms, it’s increasingly about IT infrastructure that can perform and adapt at the speed of business. That makes availability a strategic imperative for all organisations – no longer just pure-play internet businesses or low-latency financial trading.

Multiple factors are behind this shift. More organisations than ever are having to meet customer expectations of round-the-clock access to information and services. Mobilisation of the workforce is another driver, as even office-based employees are switching between multiple devices in the course of the day, whether corporate-issue or BYO.

But the single biggest factor is that removing unnecessary time to access information and services can create significant differentiation and revenue uplift.

Consumerisation has driven expectations of gratifyingly quick and simple access to answers or fulfilment that yesterday’s enterprise software often fails to provide. Access to high-speed connectivity and the latest gadgets at home reduces our tolerance for slow networks and ageing, unreliable equipment in the workplace. And a one second delay in page load can cause a 7% drop in conversions, as almost half of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less.

The trouble is, when considering availability, organisations tend to limit their definition of IT infrastructure to the traditional, feature-heavy technology elements of the data centre. But this neglects the influence of people and processes on availability – skills and experience that many organisations are hard-pressed to deliver internally. This is where outsourcing can convey tremendous advantage: by putting expertise and resources on tap to support the pursuit of All-Time™ availability.

Frictionless transition
A successful outsource partnership needs to focus on delivering the right solution for the right situation, with the supporting technology platform able to provide twenty-four-seven resilience and availability. But on-boarding is a crucial part of the data centre transformation process, as organisations look to gain experience in migrating application workloads between environments.

Mission-critical applications in particular need to be transferred quickly and seamlessly to avoid business interruption. A combination of consultative support and a migration gateway can help organisations on-board their data into a dedicated environment that acts as a staging post. Once user acceptance testing has been completed, the workload can be moved into production with confidence that demands for reliability and responsiveness will be met.

Compliant operations
All organisations, even those that aren’t in heavily regulated industries, need to maintain compliant operations. For example, any business that handles card payments from customers needs to meet the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) or risk severe financial penalties and the right to accept card payments being revoked – unthinkable for any online merchant.

The PCI standard provides an actionable framework for developing a robust security process, from prevention and detection to appropriate incident response, but there’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf PCI-compliant environment. However, a managed service provider should be able to determine and meet a company’s requirements for delivering a best-fit, compliant cardholder data environment – one that reduces complexity and accelerates the identification of and response to security threats.

Data jurisdiction is becoming a more prominent consideration than ever, in light of recent headlines around improper use and mandatory disclosure of information – especially when data is stored in multiple locations or accessible by multiple parties. When it comes to outsourcing, it’s vital to have a definitive picture of where, how and with whom data is stored, processed and shared. And data jurisdiction isn’t just an important checkpoint on the journey to a managed or hosted environment – it’s also crucial to back-up management and the ability to export the data to another third party, or indeed bring it back in-house.

Reduced vulnerability
The subtext of business disruption used to be limited to natural or man-made disasters. But nowadays, derailment is more likely to come from malicious cyber activity. Many commonly-used access control techniques were designed for enterprise data centres and, as such, are poorly suited to third party environments, as processes that were previously behind a firewall are exposed to the internet.

High profile Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have recently been attributable for putting a major high street bank and the Ministry of Justice temporarily out of action. These cyber-assaults produce a flood of traffic that overloads the target organisation’s website and quickly shuts down its operations.

A managed service provider must therefore fully grasp the escalating importance of security on today’s business environment, and help companies bolster their security posture to maintain continuous availability. DDoS mitigation, based on real-time event analysis and reporting, means a response can be mounted against such security threats before they can adversely affect operations.

Availability: not just an IT thing
Until now, availability has been measured in terms of the number and duration of service interruptions, or the percentage of services and infrastructure being monitored.

But to reflect the more intangible nature of availability, organisations need to reduce reliance on traditional IT-driven KPIs and the binary notion of uptime and downtime, in favour of greater focus on business outcomes. That means using broader customer and employee satisfaction metrics, such as Net Promoter Score, to understand how time to information affects performance, and build the business case for availability investment.

That’s because availability is not just an IT project but a continuous improvement process – one that is key to building the foundation for new opportunities, sustainable growth and unwavering brand loyalty.

KEEPING YOUR BUSINESS AFLOAT

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As demonstrated by the UK’s recent floods, weather conditions can pose considerable problems for businesses even in Britain with its relatively moderate climate. Several Sungard AS customers have needed to invoke their Workplace Recovery contracts while many more have contacted us to ask for advice or put us on standby, particularly in the Thames Valley area.

Yet, interestingly, comparing today’s floods with those of 2007 we are seeing a marked reduction in the number of invocations, which reflects changing working practices. In order to meet market demands for an ‘always-on’ workforce, companies today are adopting more sophisticated availability models and Sungard AS is increasingly providing more production IT services from our data centres.

That’s because in today’s connected world, customers and partners expect responses instantly – no matter what difficulties your company may be experiencing. If one business process or even your wider supply chain is affected by the impact of flooding, it could be months or even years before the damage to those relationships can be repaired. Even if your own business is not directly affected by flooding you could experience knock-on effects if you rely on goods or services from suppliers in hard-hit areas.

Time invested in contingency planning is likely to prove time well spent. When we supported law firm Irwin Mitchell during severe floods, while their building and infrastructure suffered £2m worth of damage, good planning ensured the firm was able to maintain near normal levels of service. Although flood waters engulfed the ground floor of two of its office buildings we were able to relocate 50 contact centre staff to one of our nearby recovery centres overnight to minimise downtime. In fact, productivity at their call centre, which handles some 7,000 calls daily, dropped just 2%. But without an effective plan in place the potential reputational damage and financial repercussions could have proved catastrophic.

The vital questions you need to ask

For businesses facing any flood risk at all, however small, the priorities must be to ensure employees remain safe and the business is able to continue running uninterrupted. Questions you should ask yourself include:

Are your premises likely to be affected by flooding? If so, you will need to consider alternative workplace facilities both in the surrounding area and further afield should the situation worsen.

Access to important data and your office is obviously critical – can your employees still get in to work, will public transport be working and can your suppliers meet their obligations?

Are you relying too heavily on remote working technologies? Severe disruption to local power or communications infrastructure can scupper plans for employees to work from home.

Most importantly of all, is your data secure and backed up? Damage to physical infrastructure can, in most cases, be restored – the same cannot always be said for crucial customer and business data.

VIRTUAL DESKTOP SERVICE ON ITS WAY

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Coming soon, Sungard AS will launch Virtual Desktop, a new workforce enablement service to support more flexible working. The managed service will not only allow executives to work wherever they want but also adapt to seasonal peaks and troughs in demand and staffing levels.

Uniquely, it will be fully integrated with Sungard AS’s disaster recovery facilities, allowing customers to recover to whichever Sungard AS or Regus location is most convenient. Developed in collaboration with market leaders Cisco and Citrix, the Virtual Desktop service offers organisations the opportunity to achieve 100% availability by choosing a failover option.

The service is already attracting considerable interest from companies keen to reduce their cost of ownership, eliminate the annual PC refresh cycle and gain greater control and security over their desktops.

Full details will be revealed soon – watch this space!

CONTINUED EXPANSION PUTS US IN POLE POSITION

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Sungard AS has opened a new dedicated facility in Wroclaw, Poland.

The town is fast becoming the financial Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) capital of Europe due to the high number of university graduates studying banking there and its proximity to the major financial capitals in Europe, compared with other countries in Asia providing similar services.

All 180 seats in the new workplace recovery centre have already been snapped up by a major international investment bank but Sungard AS is looking to take on a second site nearby to extend capacity.

Wroclaw city council views Sungard AS as being integral to its strategy of achieving BPO prominence and fosters a supportive business environment. With its own airport and good road and rail connections, the town is well connected. It is also close to the Czech border, raising the possibility of a two country recovery solution.

For more information speak to your account manager or call us on 0800 143 413 or email infoavail@sungardas.com

PLANS & TESTING DON’T DELIVER OUTCOMES – PEOPLE & PROCESSES DO

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By Bob Bates, Delivery Manager, Technology Consultant and Murray Truman, ICT Disaster Recovery Consultant

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 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 expectations 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 AS 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.

Read how HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd benefited from our Managed Recovery Programme.

For more information talk to your account manager or call us on +353 (0)1 467 3650.

HCL INSURANCE BPO SERVICES LTD FINDS PARTNERSHIP TAKES THE PAIN OUT OF RECOVERY

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In the highly competitive business processing market, cost control and availability are both critical factors. Transformational outsourcing provider HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd needed a cost-effective recovery solution that would minimise downtime and mitigate financial loss for its clients in 20 countries worldwide.

With so many clients relying on HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd services, unavailability of critical systems even for a fraction of a second would have serious ramifications. As well as having a devastating effect on customer service, it could lead to direct financial loss through breaches of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and FCA Conduct Risk guidelines. Ann Daddy, head of IT services for HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd, says, “Any downtime could have severe financial repercussions running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

As part of its efforts to ensure uninterrupted operations, HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd conducts annual recovery tests, which used to involve bringing staff over from India, incurring considerable travel and subsistence costs in the process. Sungard AS suggested HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd would benefit from its Managed Recovery Programme (MRP) in which Sungard AS takes responsibility for the full recovery lifecycle, providing a contractually guaranteed recovery time during testing and disasters.

We developed the service after witnessing customers repeatedly struggle with their disaster recovery (DR) tests. The majority fail due to the difficulty of keeping DR plans up-to-date in the face of constant business change – hardly surprising when just one change per system per month can result in more than 10,000 configuration changes before every annual test. We recognised we could apply our decades of expertise and experience of performing recoveries and managing critical systems to eliminate an unnecessary pain point for our customers. What’s more, we are able to manage HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd tests and recoveries at a far lower cost and risk than they could ever hope to achieve themselves.

The enhanced service Sungard AS provides means HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd can now perform recoveries with a smaller number of staff needing to be physically present at the recovery centre. As a result, HCL Insurance BPO Services Ltd has benefited from ongoing cost savings of more than £50,000 a year and has dramatically improved recovery times by at least 50%. Equally importantly, as Ann Daddy points out, “One of the many benefits of Sungard AS’s Managed Recovery Programme is that we no longer have any single points of failure.”

Ann Daddy says she and her senior management team “can’t praise the very professional technical team we’ve been dealing with highly enough. Partnership doesn’t begin to describe the relationship that has formed between our two companies. We’ve worked proactively and productively together towards a common goal.”

Read the full case study

MAKING A SPLASH WITH FISH

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Sungard AS continues to develop innovative applications to serve niche markets and has partnered with a number of independent software vendors to provide specialist police IT applications as a service that deliver real operational benefits.

Among the applications ‘powered by Sungard AS’ is FISH, an electronic forensics and imaging service that dramatically improves processing times for forensic identification of fingerprints, footprints, chemicals and other crucial evidence. We we will provide the FISH service through our secure IL3 cloud.

fish capture

While these applications are designed specifically for UK police forces, Sungard AS is all about providing IT solutions to business issues so if you would like an application delivered as a service, contact your service manager or call us on +353 (0)1 467 3650 to discuss the development of a tailormade service that meets your express needs.

PREPARING FOR MARKET CHANGES

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In its latest report, respected analyst 451 Research has described as “timely” our strategic reorganisation of service delivery around new tooling to reflect market demand for greater transparency and consistency in the management of contracts.

As you may already know, Sungard AS has introduced two service management portals – Viewpoint for customers and Spotlight for employees – both of which share the same infrastructure and tooling. The Sungard AS cloud services portal is currently separate from Viewpoint and Spotlight but our plan is for all the portals to be brought together in a single unified customer interface in 2015.

Commenting on our investment in these automation tools that give customers the ability to manage both their cloud services and the rest of their IT infrastructure from ‘a single pane of glass’, the analyst notes approvingly that we are “taking a pragmatic approach to service delivery, enabling accounts to opt for a more customised experience” if they prefer, “a trait of the traditionally higher value service providers”.

The flagship Sungard AS account making use of this new service delivery model is Serco, which due to its size and complexity has four dedicated service delivery managers based on Serco premises working alongside its in-house service delivery team.

451 Research acknowledge that we have changed our recruitment policy to reflect the broader skill set required from a service delivery manager with new recruits having “strong technical capabilities in order to be able to challenge the technical teams… and talk to customers about the impact of infrastructure issues.”

The analyst report concludes, “As selective outsourcing increases in the market and service integration and management (SIAM) emerges more strongly as a buyer requirement, Sungard AS is in a strong position with its tooling and staffing investments to respond both as a service provider in its own right and as part of a wider provider ecosystem.”

AND THE WINNER IS…

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It’s that time of year and we are thrilled to announce that we were selected as Cisco’s UKI Cisco Cloud Provider Partner of the Year at their recent Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas.

Sungard AS is also in contention for a number of other industry accolades including:

The CIR Business Continuity Awards 2014

Once again, we and several Sungard AS customers are in the running for awards in categories such as Resilience in Infrastructure, Most Effective Recovery, Business Continuity Team, Business Continuity Initiative and Resilience Strategy. We have also sponsored the ‘Public Sector/Not-for-Profit Continuity Manager of the Year’ category.

The shortlist has just been published and we were delighted to learn that we are finalists in both our categories alongside those customers we supported en route to becoming finalists in all of their categories.

The winners will be announced at a glittering awards ceremony on Thursday 29 May at London’s Hilton Park Lane. We wish all those customers who have entered good luck on the night – we will be cheering you on!

7th Annual Global Datacentre & Cloud Awards 2014

Sungard AS has been nominated in no fewer than three categories of these prestigious awards – cloud services, managed services and data centre. We hope to have good news to share with you following the awards
dinner on 12 June.

Alsbridge Innovation Awards

Sungard AS has submitted an entry in the inaugural year of this new award scheme created by the boutique outsourcing consultancy Alsbridge.

Watch this space!