Welcome to the winter edition of AVAIL!

We have a jam-packed Winter edition of AVAIL for you with news of new services – including SAP HANA and in the pipeline the exciting Recovery Execution System, which we are in the process of getting patented.

Also in this issue I share my IT predictions for 2016, and we bring some surprising headline findings from our research into Hybrid IT, which sparked an imaginative Jekyll & Hyde campaign.

2015 has been a year of achievement for our Ireland operation, which has been awarded the highest level of information security accreditation and expanded its data centre facilities. This is just one of the many global infrastructure investments we’ve made over the past year.

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 AVAIL@sungardas.com.

All that remains is for me to wish you a happy and peaceful festive season on behalf of all of the Sungard Availability Services team!

Keith Tilley

EVP, global sales and customer services management

This is the first issue of a global, customer newsletter from Sungard AS. AVAIL had been produced previously just for our European customers. Broadening the scope reflects our efforts to serve you in a standard way across continents. Other executives in our business will be providing you insights into areas of the business in future issues. I’m first up with the Q&A below.

This year I’ve had conversations with many customers globally. I was able to personally convey how dedicated we are to being your IT partner. For those of you whom I’ve not yet met, know that Sungard AS appreciates your business. On behalf of my colleagues at Sungard AS, I want to extend our wishes for a prosperous New Year. We look forward to working with you in 2016.

Q: How is Sungard AS faring now that it’s an independent company?

Andy: When we split-off from SunGard Data Systems in April 2014, we anticipated greater flexibility to evolve our brand, our culture and our industry relationships to best serve our customers. We started with our own brand identity and then refined what today is a very clear value proposition. Simply put, we will work with you, our customers, to understand your unique business needs. Then we will help to customize the environment that best fits your desired outcomes, leveraging both our production and recovery capabilities. This listen-first, tailored, grounded-in-resilience approach, you’ve told us, addresses needs that many other organizations cannot. Evolving our brand was one of the bigger opportunities when we split from SunGard Data Systems, and we’ve really carried through.

At the same time, we’ve invested in additional cloud instances, power, and workplace recovery seats globally. This year alone we invested in capabilities in Dublin, London, Stockholm, Bangalore and a number of core North American markets. We further have released many new offerings across our recovery and production services portfolio, at times working with other industry leaders. We continue to build strong partnerships with leaders such as Cisco, AT&T and EMC.

Financially, we’ve significantly improved our cash position and already paid down a portion of our debt. All in all, our goal has been not just to turnaround our business but to transform it. We have more to do, but we’re well on our way.

Q: Has your strategic direction changed since the split-off from SunGard Data Systems?

Andy: Our strategy hasn’t really changed, but, as an independent company, we’re able to move much faster to implement it. This year, for example, we sold eight non-core data centers in the U.S., freeing us to offer more of our services portfolio in strategic markets to us.

We’ve also evolved our organizational structure to better align with our strategy. Today we have a global approach to how we develop our offerings and to our operational support model. With this approach, we are realizing greater efficiencies ….more consistently delivering our services around the world…onboarding new customers faster…and leveraging our product development innovations globally. We continue to have deep technical expertise, which we are applying to develop innovative services such as the cloud-based recovery solution for Amazon Web Services we announced in October for the U.S. This “cloud brokerage” service adds recovery to the AWS IAAS cloud that you may be using as part of your IT environment.

Q: What are you doing operationally to improve?

Andy: Our focus on globalizing the business has enabled us to standardize and continuously improve our operations. Right now our team in India is working to standardize our processes and operational support globally. That will better enable us to leverage our skilled professionals globally while delivering a consistent service experience to you. We’re automating more activities, such as improving our customer portal. We have a redesigned, cleaner portal landing page and more self-service options. Now you can do more activities yourself, such as getting enhanced reporting, entering requests, reporting issues, checking ticket status and viewing configurations.

Speaking of automation…we also are automating workflow tasks for planning and executing our Managed Recovery Program. We are particularly excited about the possibilities for our proprietary Recovery Execution System. RES has already demonstrated that, through a high degree of orchestration and automation, we can much more quickly build infrastructure, reduce human errors and become more scalable and efficient in the delivery of recovery services.

Q: Since its founding decades ago, how is Sungard AS changing to be relevant?

Andy: We’ve been perfecting disaster recovery since 1978, when we introduced the world’s first commercial hotsite in Philadelphia. There’s still a market for those customers who want to use a shared infrastructure and off-site storage option for their own employees to use for recovery testing. But, in addition to our traditional services, we have a broad suite of recovery services today, providing a holistic approach to business resiliency. Our continued industry leadership is evidenced in both Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant Disaster Recovery as a Service report and in the DRaaS MarketScape report that IDC published last month. Not to mention the growing number of patents we’ve received (10 since April 2014, most of them related to recovery innovations).

According to DR Benchmark, roughly half of outages are caused by software or network failures; only 14 percent are weather related. Outages happen. It’s not just about preparing to recover but building resilience into our solutions. Today we’re leveraging our deep expertise and experience in DR by integrating recovery into our production solutions. That’s a more cost-effective resilience approach for you.

Increasingly many of our customers see beyond our DR capabilities. It’s why more than half of our business today is in the provision of production services. It’s why our integrated solutions – encompassing Recovery as a Service, Cloud and other managed services – are our fastest growing business. These solutions help us help you solve your most critical IT challenges.

By Keith Tilley, EVP, Global Sales & Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services

IT continues to change and develop at a rapid rate. While this pace of change can be exciting, more often than not it leaves many organisations facing complexity and confusion. 2016 will be no exception.

All businesses are feeling the pressure to innovate – not just from an efficiency and cost saving perspective – but also to remain competitive. Technologies like flexible virtualised platforms are perfect enablers of this, however if not adopted correctly they can ironically do more harm than good. Whether it’s leaving businesses with costly ‘cloud hangovers’ or unmanageable Hybrid IT estates, organisations need to be measured and considered in their approach to IT in 2016.

Alongside this pressure to adapt using new technologies, the constant change of regulation and compliance laws have left many feeling uneasy about where they stand. The research we have carried out this year has pointed towards a shortage in the appropriate skills needed to manage modern IT environments; it’s likely that we will see an increased demand for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to help businesses through what is set to be a complex year. With this in mind we have identified four challenges we expect to see in the New Year:

1. Regaining Control: Hybrid IT is Stifling Innovation
   Keen to adopt cloud solutions but not yet ready or able to move all of their IT to the cloud, organisations have evolved to a state where they are running their business across a number of different IT platforms, whether that is private or public cloud, on premise servers, or data centre services. This is Hybrid IT.While cloud computing may be considered the gateway to innovation, it is ironic to think that this rush to embrace it has now begun to prevent many organisations from innovating. Our research found that nearly a third of UK organisations (31 per cent) have seen an increase in operating costs thanks to Hybrid IT, adding an average of £251,868 every year.That is not to say that Hybrid IT does not have its benefits – 92 per cent of organisations identified this approach as a critical component of their success, with 77 per cent stating that it was a necessary part of staying competitive. In order to conquer this Jekyll & Hyde style ‘split personality’ of Hybrid IT in 2016, organisations need to invest in the right skills to understand and manage these different applications that sit across IT platforms and to maintain security, availability and integration.

1. Unchartered Data Regulation Territory
   With regulations frequently introduced and updated it is easy to see that organisations do not know exactly where they stand. For example the recent change to the Safe Harbor ruling make specific restrictions against US ‘based’ companies – but what does ‘US based’ even mean? Is it those companies whose HQ is in the US? Or any company that has a presence there?One thing is clear; organisations are in the dark about what is right and what is wrong, which is unacceptable. With corporate reputation on the line and the threat of hefty fines looming, businesses will not have the excuse of playing ignorant. Businesses need to ensure that they have taken all the necessary precautions. With this in mind organisations should expect a high level of understanding from any technology providers they work with, along with sufficient accreditation such as the globally accepted ISO 27001 standards.

1. Mind the Skills Gap
   For years businesses have been bombarded by messages about the cloud and virtual technologies and the benefits offered: cutting costs, simplifying IT and reducing the time taken to launch new products and services.What isn’t mentioned is the demand created for a new set of skills. Despite what is often promised, the cloud is rarely set up and managed in a couple of clicks. It requires an in-depth knowledge of new (and often niche) IT platforms as well as a full re-think of the general procurement process, plus working out which applications can be migrated to the cloud, and how. This is especially true in this era of Hybrid IT, given that cloud sits alongside legacy technology, other applications and indeed other clouds. In fact, we found that half of organisations (50 per cent) claim they do not have the skill sets needed to manage a complex IT environment, which is why they are increasingly rightsourcing for experts help.

1. Too much choice causing a headache
   There are many different options when it comes to cloud computing, or other technology applications. While a variety of options is without a doubt a positive, it could lead many businesses to become confused or drift into an IT solution that is not optimum for delivering business outcomes.

Forget the technical specifications, today’s IT is about enabling businesses to increase their bottom-line by reacting quicker to market changes, staying ahead of the competition and offering the right services to customers in an all-time world.

A well-considered battle plan is essential for success in 2016, ensuring you are using every weapon at your disposal, especially IT. And if having an expert cloud or Managed Services Partner as part of this process, able to free up the CIO to make those all important strategic decisions that will deliver the desired business outcomes… So be it.

Health warning:
Do not read on if you are of a delicate disposition

Sungard Availability Services’ new Jekyll & Hyde research-led campaign lifts the lid on a disturbing new phenomenon rapidly taking over IT departments of businesses around the country. We are talking about the strange state of affairs known as ‘Hybrid IT’.

Sparked by research revealing this approach was a deliberate strategy for 75% of organisations, the campaign highlights the numerous problems a mix of often-conflicting IT platforms can cause. A cunning combination of private or public cloud, on-premise servers and data centre services – deemed necessary to remain competitive – has increased the complexity of IT estates and the resultant muddled mess is making it difficult for IT decision-makers to innovate.

But as we all know, there are two sides to every story and over half (53%) claimed to have seen an increase in business agility. Improved customer service and the speed of product developments were also cited as benefits by 39% and 37% respectively. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, this tortuously tangled IT infrastructure has increased the running costs of IT with nearly a third of organisations (31%) claiming it adds an average of £251,868 every year!

Worryingly, half say they do not have the skill sets needed to manage their hybrid IT estates. Over a third (38%) lack the necessary skills to deal with security issues while integration and interoperability are also crucial concerns. More than a quarter (27%) are struggling to integrate private cloud environments into their IT estate and 22% admit to difficulties managing different IT systems across separate business departments.

The campaign explains that a professionally prepared elixir with the right combination of ingredients can transform the Hyde in your IT environment into a much more agreeable Jekyll and tame the beast that is Hybrid IT.

Our retail customers may be interested to know that a press release uncovering the ghastly goings-on in their sector will be released in the week of 23 November while financial services customers should fortify themselves with a stiff tonic in preparation for more sector-specific revelations in the week of 7 December.

If you are among the many organisations bedevilled by a shortage of IT professionals with specialist skills, gird yourself for the release of a white paper on this very topic in the New Year.

Now if you are fortunate to be blessed with a robust constitution you are welcome to digest more scary survey snippets by downloading the white paper here but, be warned, you read at your peril!

If your organisation depends on SAP you may well be considering moving to SAP HANA to benefit from enhanced performance. But to get the most out of your complex SAP HANA environment it needs to be optimised and this can be difficult to achieve on your own. From getting the number of licences right to interoperability issues and the cloud migration process itself, there are many potential pitfalls to trip the unwary in the rush to embrace SAP HANA.

As for Oracle, Sungard Availability Services offers proven Application Management Services for SAP environments that assure you of high availability, avoid compatibility issues and ensure you pay only for the number of licences you actually need. This is no simple task given the tangle of legacy and shadow IT-acquired environments faced by most businesses, exacerbated by the added challenge of accelerated SAP HANA adoption.

Our experienced consultants first gain an understanding of your business requirements then design and build an optimised, consumption-based SAP HANA environment. This is tailored to your specific requirements and delivered via the cloud. If you’ve been paying for more licences than your organisation needs – or, like many businesses, are unsure of your license requirements and running the risk of non-compliance – this enables you to ‘right size’ your SAP HANA infrastructure.

In the past, one of the major hurdles was identifying exactly how much compute power each customer used on shared servers. We are able to overcome that through the use of hardware partitioning in our virtual platforms. This allows us to identify consumption by individual customer so each pays only for what they use.

The robust configuration we design for you will be based on SAP HANA infrastructure from top to bottom, which means it’s fully approved and supported. It also eliminates any disputes concerning compatibility or ownership of technical issues. We take a holistic view of your whole hybrid IT ecosystem to ensure all the data, applications and systems that feed into your SAP HANA infrastructure will work as they did before following your move to the cloud.

Then, of course, while SAP HANA has all the inbuilt resilience you would expect from any Sungard Availability Services-managed application, in the unlikely event of an interruption, who better to manage your recovery?

If your organisation is among the thousands of SAP customers considering moving away from what they view as a monolithic application to the brave new world of the cloud and you would like to find out more, talk to your account manager, email avail@sungardas.com or call 0800 143 413.

By Keith Tilley, Executive Vice President for Global Sales and Customer Services

Whether it be storms, snow or flooding, the ever changing winter weather is notorious for grinding transport to a halt, causing misery to commuters and costing businesses precious workforce productivity.

The issue of the dreaded commute appears to be one that is getting worse. Not only are these disruptions a problem for businesses in the immediate, but it can also have an impact on employee mentality and in turn productivity in the long run. With research finding that people will spend over 10,634 hours of their career commuting to work¹ – mostly in increasingly cramped and uncomfortable conditions. As delays and disruptions increase in the winter months, it is enough to frustrate even the most resilient commuter, leading inevitably to a drop in effectiveness at work.

The weather has always been a topic of concern for us Brits, yet we seem powerless when it comes to provisioning against it. The government has been criticised for its lack of a coherent and consistent strategy when it comes to dealing with extreme weather in the past, and no long term solution appears to have emerged. So, how can businesses combat the elements and remain productive?

The key lies in working with your staff, and not against them, by creating a work environment that allows them to work anywhere – no matter the weather. Flexible working is no longer the novelty it once was; in fact arrangements are increasingly regarded as a right, not privilege, especially as the new generation starts to enter the workforce. As such today’s businesses are starting to rethink the way they provision their computing environment in the interests of agility through times of stagnation.

Turning to virtual technologies could be the answer. If the workforce can access business critical information from any device or location this would reduce the need for many employees to waste hours battling the disrupted commute and could support hot-desking and other space saving working models. It also cuts down the risk of disruption should the office be left inaccessible due to extreme weather or other issues.

Employees normally tied to the office with a desktop PC are symptomatic of an old-fashioned and outdated approach to handling sensitive information and increasing productivity. Virtualising the desktop and applications is arguably the best way to secure your data and provide work location flexibility since the data and processing takes place in a datacentre not the end-user device. Face to face meetings are still a vital part of business communications, but having the option to work from different locations could prove valuable in enhancing both staff efficiency and employee happiness.

The adoption of cloud computing has been a critical turning point in unlocking employee productivity regardless of time or place. In fact, earlier in the year we commissioned research² which found that when utilised properly the cloud gave businesses increased agility for 77% of respondents, improved availability for 67%, and 43% claimed that the cloud gave them a competitive advantage.

Working practices have failed to catch up with the modern era. The need to go to the office on a strict 9-5 basis is an outdated concept that does not fit with today’s digital age, or the expectations of Gen-Y workers. A modern business needs to invest in modern solutions, giving employees the freedom they now expect. Ultimately, an employee’s business contribution is not measured by their office presence, but in the results and value they supply – does the location from where these are achieved really matter?

¹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/household-bills/10792453/Commuting-costs-50000-over-a-career.html

²http://www.sungardas.co.uk/Services/Cloud/Pages/Cloud-Hangover.aspx

The many achievements of the Sungard Availability Services Ireland team during 2015 mean customers can be reassured they are in great hands! These include gaining the highest level of information security management accreditation and the addition of a state-of-the-art Certified Tier III data centre, capped by a brand new appointment strengthening Ireland’s senior management team.

Following on from certification of our enterprise-grade shared private cloud environment and managed services offering in Ireland, our ISO 27001: 2013 information security accreditation has now been extended to cover the new facility at Profile Park, Dublin. This internationally recognised, independent verification shows we can securely manage information security, maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all data. It means we have proved we’ve taken all appropriate steps to properly secure both our own data and that of customers, giving you peace of mind that your mission-critical information is safe and readily accessible.

The partnership with Digital Realty Trust announced last issue not only gives us larger data centre facilities in Dublin and underlying infrastructure for our full portfolio of services including our global cloud platform, but will also create around 50 new jobs in Ireland. One of those new positions is that of Head of New Business Development, part of a new strategy for us that will specifically centre on developing relationships and providing consultancy to new and existing customers looking to expand their presence in Ireland. The impressive Paul Slattery has recently been appointed to the role, which reports directly into Jean-Philippe Sohier, SVP of European Sales.

With over 20 years’ experience, Slattery brings with him a wealth of industry knowledge and important strategic connections having worked for companies including UPC Ireland, Verizon (WorldCom) – and most recently represented GTT Communications as Sales Director for UK and Ireland. Slattery also acts as an Adjunct Lecturer for the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School where he lectures on their Executive MBA programme, as well as giving back to the community by helping out on projects such as Jobnet.

Commenting on his appointment, Paul stated, “I’m thrilled to have joined Sungard Availability Services, especially at such an exciting time for the company in Ireland. It’s great to see the growing demand from global businesses looking to host their data here and benefit from the infrastructure and knowledge economy that is rapidly developing within the region. I’m looking forward to working with the team to attract some great customers and create more jobs here in Ireland.”

Given all the developments during 2015 you might think the Ireland team could afford to slow down a little but that is unlikely to happen. “In today’s market, which is increasingly focused around online services, data security is of critical importance and this will only become more so with forthcoming changes to data protection regulations,” Paul Slattery explains. “As the gateway to Europe, we expect our Ireland operation to see increased demand from businesses for our proven cloud and infrastructure services from businesses to whom resilience and compliance is paramount.”

During 2015 Sungard Availability Services invested heavily in building our global network of workplace recovery centres, reinforcing our continued commitment to business continuity and workforce enablement. This comes at a time when commercial property prices have increased, service provider supply has reduced and demand for workplace recovery seats remains healthy. In case you missed any of the announcements, here’s a recap of developments during the past year:

City of London (COL) Recovery Centre

We opened a brand-new workplace recovery centre in central London, the first of its kind in a decade. The 700-seat facility is equipped with the latest conferencing equipment and IT infrastructure. Users have access to 10GB-ready networking infrastructure, which is able to cope with heavier data traffic and increasing workloads.

The site is perfectly positioned within walking distance of the City and works well as part of a ‘near-far’ business availability solution in conjunction with one of our many sites throughout Greater London and the south-east. The Financial Conduct Authority’s requirement for financial services companies (including insurers) to “maintain continuity of all core systems in the face of loss or failure resources, loss of information and even external events such as vandalism or acts of God” means this site has great strategic importance for our customers and the market as a whole.

Profile Park, Dublin

As reported in the summer edition of AVAIL, we made a significant investment to expand our presence in Ireland following a partnership with Digital Realty, the world’s largest data centre provider. It is providing the data centre and underlying infrastructure from which we can host our award-winning global cloud platform and a full range of production and recovery services.

Designed to address Ireland’s growing demand for agile, flexible and resilient IT services, this expansion also allows us to cater for the increasing number of businesses choosing to base themselves in Ireland. The infrastructure provided by Digital Realty’s new technology hub in Dublin enables the building out of our pre-existing facility to create up to 300 additional dedicated end-user positions where firms can relocate critical personnel during a disaster.

Bangalore

During the year we also opened our fourth workplace recovery site in India with a new 265 seat facility in Bangalore joining existing facilities in Noida, Mumbai and Chennai. This takes our total number of seats in the region to nearly 2,600, which we believe makes Sungard AS the largest provider in India.

India remains a popular destination for European and US companies looking to offshore operations to a cost-competitive, relatively stable and scalable location. We have a thriving operation in India helping the domestic and international business community mitigate general and location-specific threats. Multinationals, in particular, increasingly expect the same high level of business continuity (BC) provision enjoyed by their operations in Europe or the US for commercial and regulatory reasons.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI), the world’s leading body for BC professionals, recognised Sungard AS India’s market leadership with three awards in 2015. We were judged Business Continuity Provider of the Year for Service and Product for the third year in a row while AssuranceCM, our business continuity management software, also won the Continuity & Resilience Innovation award.

Wroclaw, Poland

We are in the process of expanding our Wroclaw site for dedicated use by an existing customer, which will see seat numbers increase to 400 positions. This is scheduled to be completed by early 2016.

These investments demonstrate the increasing demand from organisations not only for physical recovery space but also virtual and cloud-based solutions that will enable them to keep their businesses running, no matter what.

For information about any of our workplace recovery centres, call us on 0800 143 413 or email avail@sungardas.com

It isn’t often in our sector that something genuinely transformational comes along and revolutionises the industry. We think we have achieved this with our new Recovery Execution System (RES), an invention so original that Sungard Availability Services is in the process of patenting it.

Traditional recovery of hybrid IT environments requires a lot of manual processes to understand the customer’s production environment, build and maintain a recovery environment at time of test or disaster and keep the two perfectly aligned throughout its lifecycle.

Not any more! Sungard AS has obliterated all of the manual recovery processes and, uniquely, automated recovery from start to finish. On average, this change cuts recovery time by 70%. Yes 70%.

So how do we do it? (Here comes the technical bit)

Our Managed Recovery Programme (MRP) is a systematic approach to recovery that holistically encompasses the people, process and governance elements involved and leverages technology to achieve the required recovery outcome. Its comprehensive scope includes discovery of the customer production environment and application dependencies, design of the recovery strategy and plans, at time of test or disaster execution of recovery and ongoing lifecycle management.

Traditionally, recovery execution has involved maintaining and executing manual recovery procedures – a process that is both resource-intensive and prone to human error. Based on our extensive experience of successfully recovering customers, we have invented an innovative automation process – Recovery Execution System (RES)¹ – solely for MRP customers.

MRP leverages automated Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) technology to address the customer’s pain point of identifying production layout and keeping up with lifecycle changes. This allows the customer recovery configuration to be kept up-to-date in a Sungard AS-hosted and managed Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

MRP powered by RES now dynamically reads the recovery configuration from the CMDB and automatically generates the recovery workflow – the set of instructions used to execute the recovery at time of test or disaster – on the fly. While there are other systems on the market today that automate the discovery process and map dependencies, we have taken the concept to the next level by using the information contained in the CMDB to automatically generate and execute the entire recovery workflow process, eliminating the need for manual development and maintenance of procedure documents.

Automating the recovery process in this way has many benefits:

• Cuts recovery time by up to 70%. This is made possible due to automated provisioning, building, configuring and restoring of hosts.
• Eliminates the risk of human error. Instead of laboriously drawing up recovery procedures manually, RES automatically generates a methodical, step-by-step recovery workflow which is then executed by IT process orchestration technology. Consequently, it ensures repeatable results and improved recoverability.
• Enables skilled resources to focus on complex recovery issues. If the recovery process stalls for any reason or the system encounters data corruption, the system instantly produces an IT trouble ticket for immediate attention by our skilled service engineers to resolve before resuming the automated execution.
• Enables better end user validation testing. As tests and recoveries are performed in a fraction of the time with RES, there is more time available during a recovery exercise for end user validation and acceptance testing by the customer.

Although the RES orchestration framework is initially being used for recovery purposes, work is underway to explore the feasibility of extending it to other use cases such as data centre migration and an ‘appliance’ mode that allows it to work outside a Sungard Availability Services setting.

Already live in the US, RES (patent pending) is scheduled to become available for MRP customers across Europe in the first half of 2016.

To find out more about MRP or how RES works, please contact your account manager in the first instance, call 0800 143 413 or email infoavail@sungardas.com

¹Patent applied for

Back in the spring issue, we highlighted the current shortage of IT specialists and showed how this is causing real problems for nearly four out of ten firms who are struggling to recruit workers with the advanced technical skills they need.

As we all know, this is a perennial problem but it has been exacerbated by the growth of cloud computing, which has made digital technologies more affordable for small and medium-sized businesses that no longer have to deal with prohibitive upfront costs. In the past, it was only employees at ‘traditional’ IT firms that required digital skills, now staff from a wide range of industries are required to have some form of computer literacy.

This has led to increased competition for individuals with IT skills as recruiters realise there is a looming skills gap where companies cannot find members of staff with the knowledge and expertise to exploit cloud resources. It has meant that some existing members of staff have been retrained or reskilled in order to smooth the transition from in-house IT resources to those based in the cloud. Businesses have also had to face new challenges relating to the cloud, relying on their employees to handle any disruptions. Issues relating to data protection and integration are relatively recent business phenomena brought about by the cloud and employees that have the skills needed to deal with these issues are highly sought-after.

The cloud has also had a major impact on the skill sets required by more technical staff. The cloud delivery model has led to more regular software updates and faster deployments, changing the role played by developers. Software engineers must now have the skills to handle automation and DevOps, two relatively recent cloud developments. The role of a developer is now more closely aligned with operations staff and other IT personnel, meaning that they need to be able to work in larger teams and collaborate frequently. Cloud has also led to the growth of mobile working, so developers must be able to create flexible applications that suit this environment, as well as desktop PCs. Because the cloud has brought applications to a wider range of staff, developers must have the ability to tailor software to vastly differing needs.

The proliferation of cloud vendors over the last decade has also altered the kind of skills desired by IT managers and CTOs. So much of the IT landscape can now be outsourced, from individual applications to entire infrastructures, so in-house skill sets are changing. Capacity planning and server maintenance, for example, are now being carried out by cloud vendors, leaving IT staff to focus on other processes. Instead, businesses need employees who understand the cloud environment all the way from the network layer to the application stage. Having knowledge of load balancing, network routing, virtualisation and open source technologies is extremely useful in the modern workplace.

The shift has also led to greater emphasis on soft skills. Partnership and teamwork is vital between customer and cloud vendor so having the ability to collaborate is becoming increasingly important.

All these factors led to us developing our Residency Service, a staff augmentation service that provides technical and service specialists to perform project-related tasks or business as usual operational activities. We offer it to existing customers who are struggling to resource their IT function perhaps because they need a specific set of skills, face budget or policy limitations such as a headcount freeze, have a short-term project or are having trouble recruiting talent to a specific location.

If you’d like to discuss whether Residency Services could benefit your organisation, contact your account manager in the first instance, email avail@sungardas.com or call 0800 143 413 for more information.

We are sure you will join us in congratulating Pat Morley, our VP Global Recovery Services and Operations Director – Europe, who beat stiff competition from the Scottish Government and EE to win the prestigious ITSM Project of the Year Award 2015.

This was awarded not for having the longest job title imaginable but for creating our internal ITIL-aligned process portal ‘AskPAT’. Process Application Tool (PAT) displays our process maps, which link to documentation on our intranet in a visual format that is easy to find and follow. It has been instrumental in educating staff on our procedures and ensuring you receive a consistent service at all Sungard Availability Services locations.

“We kicked off this project back in 2014 following an ITIL gap analysis” explains Pat Morley. “As a result of the project, which extended about 12 months, we rewrote 26 ITIL disciplines and now meet ITIL standards in the UK.”

Our award was for completing “the most successful and challenging IT Service Management project during the year,” notes the ITSM website. These industry awards highlight the achievements of IT service management individuals and teams “whose skills, commitment and imagination have marked them out for special recognition.”

Congratulations also go to Jacqueline Rhodes, Continuous Service Improvement Manager, who successfully project managed the implementation.

The IT Services Management Forum UK is the country’s leading association for organisations involved in IT service management with more than 700 member organisations spanning suppliers, user organisations, academia, consultants, standards and practice bodies, as well as individuals.