Keith’s Foreword: A time for plans and projects

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Welcome to Spring AVAIL.

As Tolstoy remarked in Anna Karenina, “Spring is the time of plans and projects” and that certainly seems to hold true for Sungard Availability Services and you, our customers.

In our first edition of AVAIL in 2017, we cover the imminent arrival of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the preparations we should all be making now in readiness.

Then there’s my article on the four most important projects CIOs need to tackle this year if they want their business to keep up with the rapidly shifting IT landscape.

We also discuss our pivotal study into the challenges currently exercising the IT industry and invite you to apply for a copy of the resultant Little Book of IT. We believe you’ll find it thought-provoking reading. While on the subject, I’d urge you to take a few minutes to complete our benchmarking survey and see how you compare to your peers.

We share the secret of our unparalleled recovery success rate – consistently above 90% – in a must-read article ’10 steps to a successful recovery’. This is the tried-and-tested process we follow ourselves with great results.

In other news, we talk about how apps are disrupting the status quo by enabling new players to take on the established ‘big beasts’ in several industry sectors. With apps now driving infrastructure, what does this mean for your business?

And, in the latest instalment of our Tame the Bear research, we look at the impact of cloud computing on the manufacturing, retail and public sectors.

As always, I hope you enjoy this issue and my team welcomes your feedback on any aspect of the magazine. Just send your comments to the editor at AS.UK.AvailEditor@sungardas.com.

Keith Tilley

Executive Vice President and Vice-Chair, Sungard Availability Services

From cost centre to profit centre: the changing role of IT and the CIO

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When Josh Crowe took his first job as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) 20 years ago, things were vastly different. Here, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) leverages that experience to talk about the role of the CIO then and now and how we can ease the transition.

 

Q: Josh, how would you define the role of the CIO today and how has it changed over the last three to five years?

Josh: At one time, the CIO was more of a cost centre manager, responsible for leading information technology, application and even facilities teams as they supplied IT services to the internal users of an organisation. Most CIO roles today have some element of responsibility for the product and service areas of the business, particularly as businesses expand their offerings with digital delivery aspects.

In some cases, the CIO is now in charge of commercialising new digital offerings to compliment the brick-and-mortar business. In the past, the CIO may have been selected as a result of their cost management acumen, while today’s CIO must increasingly be a growth-minded innovation leader. The expectation of the CEO and the board is that CIOs are focused on leading the company through a digital transformation that will impact both internal and external customers.

 

Q: Beyond digital transformation, what other IT trends have made things easier or more difficult for the CIO?

Josh: While traditional technologies have become easier to manage, that doesn’t necessarily translate to a more stable, predictable role for the CIO. That’s largely for three reasons:

First, the volume of technologies being managed has risen dramatically. Second, the criticality of information technology to the business has increased exponentially, driving down tolerance for downtime, security-related risks and other issues. Finally, our expectations for the speed and quality of delivery continue to increase. The business simply expects secure applications, deployed rapidly and with 24/7 availability.

In particular, security risks and compliance requirements are more complex and real-time, making it a lot more challenging for a CIO to keep up with the security posture of the company. The sophistication, level of maturity and frequency of attacks increases so frequently, it can be very expensive for organisations to understand their risks, let alone manage them.

At the same time, as IT is enabling growth with new technologies, they still have to manage legacy environments. Many of their core systems today require a fair amount of governance, and a certain set of processes and skills that are significantly different than those needed for more innovative technologies.

So, CIOs must be able to balance time across competing requirements, with an increased emphasis on recruiting and retaining talent for the emerging technologies they may adopt now and in the future.

 

Q: What priorities do you think a CIO needs to focus on to meet those challenges?

Josh: First and foremost, they need to concentrate on the digital transformation of the company and how IT can support their strategy. At the same time, they need to manage the business risks of both their new initiatives and their existing applications and data, because the importance of their digital assets is increasing daily.

So, it’s critical to secure and protect those assets from both inside and outside threats, while maintaining the availability of their systems to keep the business running during times of increased workloads, changes in how the systems are used and in times of disaster.

 

Q: Where do you see the most opportunities emerging in the year ahead?

Josh: The increasing adoption of Infrastructure as a Service has really been a tipping point for increasing opportunities. The CIO now has the ability to create, shrink, expand and evolve their infrastructure capabilities with the call of an API.

That puts tremendous capabilities at IT’s fingertips. What may have taken a significant amount of money and time to build out a large, enterprise-grade application infrastructure, they can now do in minutes with a little bit of code.

For the CIO, that’s a very powerful capability and it changes how they think about and deploy their applications. But it also enables innovation, growth and experimentation. They can build, deploy and try out a new application, and, if it’s not working as expected, or it doesn’t generate the customer feedback they want, they can pull it back fairly quickly. It allows for more rapid application development and innovation.

There are lots of new technologies coming out that really make infrastructure and application deployment less of a headache for IT organisations, while opening up significant possibilities that make the world of the CIO even more exciting and relevant to the business.

For instance, there are new ways to move workloads between clouds and for migrating workloads to new platforms that are transforming disaster recovery, enabling customers to have a highly available environment with full visibility into their compliance and recoverability posture on very short notice.

The tools enabling rapid development and deployment of applications are getting better as well, allowing IT to start adopting some of the best practices, like continuous deployment, that previously saw limited adoption in the enterprise.

 

Q: How will Sungard AS play a role in helping customers take advantage of those opportunities?

Josh: As an infrastructure provider, Sungard AS has the capability to run the systems customers have today, as well as those they want to run newer applications.

For example, our Managed Cloud – Hosted Private offering, based on VMware, is capable of delivering the performance and availability our customers need for both their existing systems and the new systems they’re deploying. We now have our Managed Cloud – AWS service to manage hyper-scale cloud services with some of the best practices our customers are used to receiving from Sungard AS. These two platforms are the core infrastructure we’ll use to run our customers’ workloads in the coming years.

Looking forward, Sungard AS’s role isn’t just to run our customers’ production environments, or to ensure that environment is completely recoverable if disaster occurs. Increasingly, our customers want our help defining their infrastructure strategy and helping them move from their current state to a new, more modern set of infrastructure solutions. By helping them transition and managing that infrastructure for them on a go-forward basis, it enables CIOs to focus their time and energy on applications that differentiate their business and drive revenue.

Ground-breaking study shows IT is at a crossroads

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In the last edition of AVAIL we invited IT decision-makers to take the opportunity to share their views in a pivotal study showing how IT is evolving and comparing pain points and business visions across industries, regions and job levels. The resulting Little Book of IT, based on interviews with 1,350 IT decision-makers across the UK, US, Canada, India, Ireland, France and Sweden, gives an inside look at the challenges faced by IT leaders and shows where the IT industry is today.

It is clear we are at a tipping point and this is the time to learn the lessons of the past to avoid having to play ‘catch up’ again in a few years’ time. This means ensuring your IT environment remains fluid and agile, able to shift with the changing times and your changing business needs.

Because in this age of IT disruption where digital technologies are transforming how, when and where business gets done, the speed at which we can embrace those technologies determines our ability to compete. What came across loud and clear from the research is that in this new digital-focused corporate world, IT is indisputably the single most important part of the organisation, driving revenue, efficiencies and innovation. Consequently, the role of the IT decision-maker has never been more crucial.

However, too often your technology is just not up to the job you need it to do in order to achieve company objectives. Some refer to Digital Transformation as being a journey. But many of these journeys are being slowed by a failure to modernise quickly enough, having limited resources with the right skill sets, while being mindful of the ever-present resilience and security concerns.

The data has shown that managing both traditional and newer, more agile environments at the same time poses a huge resourcing issue, especially for legacy IT environments.

You told us that the frustrating experiences of dealing with inherited, inflexible, non-interoperable IT estates is frequently the cause of your biggest headaches. Whether you are new to dealing with these challenges or a veteran who has faced years of budget constraints and decaying legacy systems, you can be sure the need for fundamental change is something that is affecting your peers too.

And these are not the only difficulties. How do you reconcile the funding conflict between investing in innovative technologies that could really make a difference and simply ‘keeping the lights’ on? How are your competitors and peers tackling the thorny issue of Shadow IT?

Discover how you compare to your peers!

The Little Book of IT is just the start of a unique ongoing study into the state of the IT industry by the people who know it best – the IT decision-makers who are at the sharp end of strategy dilemmas, funding conflicts and resourcing challenges. We aim to build on this research each year and would like you to be part of it from the very beginning.

How does your organisation compare to the majority in terms of pain points, approaches and plans? How do others resolve the budget conflict between capitalising on exciting new technologies and patching up decaying legacy infrastructure? Are you ahead of, or behind your peers when it comes to digitalisation – or taking a different path altogether?

You can find out instantly by answering just six high level questions to receive your personalised Benchmarking Report showing how you compare to your peers in the following key areas:

  1. IT budget and investment
  2. Staffing resource and development investment
  3. Control and influence of the IT department
  4. Technology adoption
  5. Application development
  6. Challenges and opportunities

 

We believe you won’t find this valuable information anywhere else – and it’s yours for the taking. Click here to see how you compare.

There are many more insights revealed in the Little Book of IT, and as a valued customer, we’d like to share these important research findings with you. Register here to receive your complimentary copy.

LittleBookofIT.com          #LittleBookofIT

If you only do four things in 2017…

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As this is the first edition of AVAIL in 2017, we thought it worthwhile to look at what organisations can do to position themselves to succeed in the year ahead.

We caught up with Keith Tilley, Executive Vice President and Vice-Chair for Sungard Availability Services, and asked him what customers’ priorities should be over the next 12 months. This is what he told us:

 

Modernise your Data Centre strategy

Modern digital working practices are not just key – they are essential – to business success. But with the IT landscape becoming more complex, and legacy IT potentially holding back innovation, organisations need a data centre strategy that can support these bi-modal Hybrid IT functions.

Not only must modern data centre capabilities be able to support ‘Hybrid IT’,   they must also have inbuilt resilience to maintain robust security and constant availability of services to meet the demands of today’s business. End users – whether internal or external to the business – will settle for nothing less. Juggling data centre modernisation while maintaining constant uptime and appropriate security is no mean feat.

With the vast array of aspects involved in delivering the right infrastructure to deliver business outcomes, organisations increasingly need expert help to achieve these data centre environments.


Know where your data resides

The events of 2016 – and their repercussions for 2107 – are certain to bring the issue of data sovereignty back to the forefront. Companies should be looking more holistically at where their data is hosted, where it’s backed up, moved and recovered, as well as who can see it along the way. The UK’s vote to leave the European Union has thrown up far more questions about data laws and compliance, and will require businesses to consider this more closely, particularly with the onset of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has the potential to affect companies not only in Europe but worldwide.

Data laws are constantly subject to change, with region and country specific regulation often causing a headache for large organisations. Working with a third-party provider who is open and honest about data access and data residency, as well as offer global options that allow a company to meet country level regulations, will be vital.


Get the Tech or lose the Talent

In 2016 our research found that over a fifth of employees have already left a job because they didn’t feel they had access to the latest digital technology. With many roles increasingly relying on tech, businesses who fail to listen to employee demands and invest in the tools they need could soon find themselves rapidly losing headcount.

However, it would be a mistake to simply throw money and technology at the problem. To avoid digital discontent across the business, assessing and developing an agile company culture will be vital. Early adopters of technology can help to increase a wider uptake if these people are harnessed to influence employees towards the cause. Once you begin to encourage employees to embrace changes to technology, future tech should be easier to incorporate; helping to increase adoption rates and making its impact on the business sooner rather than later.


Hire a Digital Training Officer

Organisations need skilled and adaptive employees to survive this current storm of uncertainty. While bringing in new talent can help with this, businesses should be placing just as much emphasis on training their existing staff. To do this effectively, it may be necessary to hire or create a Digital Training Officer (DTO).

Operating across the entire business, the DTO role would be responsible for upskilling employees in digital technologies. DTOs should also be tasked with empowering the workforce to get the most out of the latest digital tools – from social platforms such as Yammer, through to more complex, divisional specific applications, such as the sales team’s mobile CRM. With social and digital media now an integral part of daily life, the DTO needs to ensure its appropriate strategic fit to the commercial life of the enterprise too.

The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty itself. Whether disruption comes from political, environmental, social or technological origins, business leaders can be assured it will come their way. The decision they need to make is to understand where their most likely exposures lie, and use that understanding to build in the solutions that will deliver the non-stop access to their businesses that their customers demand.  The people, processes and technologies exist to help them achieve this. Having a cloud or Managed Services Partner can be part of this process, helping to guide organisations through this era of the unknown and allowing them to focus on innovating and remaining competitive.

Here’s to a successful 2017 for all our readers!

Managed Cloud AWS gives you the best of two leading brands

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From 31 March, Sungard Availability Services will offer managed services on both our hosted private cloud (HPC) and on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS). Managed Cloud – AWS will give you all the compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality your business needs coupled with the expert design, configuration and support you expect from a Sungard AS managed service.

In a very short period of time, cloud adoption has moved from experimentation to mainstream production workloads. AWS’ compute capacity is ten times greater than its 14 competitors combined[1] and millions of customers already use AWS cloud products and solutions. But, as many businesses have found, migrating applications to a cloud environment is not easy.

To start with, one size does not fit all. The needs of your applications are what determine the right infrastructure and cloud choices and, consequently, some 85%[2] of organisations are adopting a multi-cloud strategy – choosing different clouds for different applications. IT teams recognise the need for a cloud strategy but are looking for help in identifying, creating and delivering this strategy to avoid the risk of making costly mistakes.

At the same time, Hybrid IT is a reality for most with almost three out of four businesses forced to rely on legacy systems that are not suitable for cloud, adding to the complexity of their IT environment. While many cloud recovery services focus solely on cloud-based applications, Sungard AS’ holistic approach to recovery means we can recover all your IT environment, no matter how complex. This includes related applications that run on physical legacy systems. They may account for only a small proportion of your infrastructure but cannot be ignored because your cloud-based IT can still be dependent on physical legacy systems to deliver part of a mission-critical business application or process. As a result, if your cloud application is dependent on legacy IT, the slowest recoverable technology will hold back the recovery time performance of the virtual machine(s).

In this age of high profile cyberattacks and platform outages, keeping your data secure and IT infrastructure up-and-running has never been more important. Managed Cloud – AWS gives you the option to recover to and from AWS, a Hosted Private Cloud or any other infrastructure as part of a holistic recovery. Through our portfolio of recovery services ranging from self-managed to fully-managed recovery, we offer a broad range of Recovery Time (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) according to business expectations and budget, which are backed by industry-leading SLAs.

Highlights of our managed service for AWS

  • Account Federation –Providing a single view to all the accounts in your environment. Using our single sign on to access all your AWS accounts under Sungard AS management. We use native AWS Identity and Access Management
    (IAM) to provide the appropriate level of predefined
    role-based access.
  • Configuration and compliance – While AWS offers the basic building blocks for configuration and compliance across accounts, Sungard AS’ Managed Cloud – AWS ensures these checks are enabled and enforced across every account.
  •  Billing alerts based on your pre-set thresholds to quickly identify if your teams or applications exceed spending thresholds.
  • Enhanced Snapshot tool – AWS’ native snapshot functionality works, but can be expensive, hard to manage, and does not allow for scheduling. So, we developed our Enhanced Snapshot tool that works with AWS’ native snapshot functionality, but adds extra features such as:
    • Storage cost savings: Saves most recent snapshot to EBS and moves historical snapshots to S3 at S3 pricing, reducing the cost of snapshot storage by up to 40%
    • Deduplication: Further reduces storage costs
    • Scheduling: You control when the snapshots are taken.
  • Enterprise-grade support with 24/7/365 monitoring and support provided by AWS-certified engineers.

As with all services we offer, Sungard AS starts by listening to your IT and business requirements. We then work with you to identify which applications are cloud-ready, which are best served in an AWS environment and build a plan to migrate. We will then help you architect and manage the right AWS environment for your applications, using a number of tools we have developed to enhance your AWS experience and ensure you build to best practice.

If you’re attracted by the opportunity to exploit all the benefits of AWS cloud services with the customised configuration, recoverability and support provided by Sungard AS, call us on 0800 143 413 or email avail@sungardas.com to find out more!

 

[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2016, Worldwide

[2] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry Predictions 2017

Today’s apps mean big business

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Today, apps are no longer just for games – they are taking on big business. Just as David once felled Goliath with a well-aimed pebble, so too are start-up businesses disrupting their larger, more established rivals with one small, newly developed tool: digital-first apps. Appealing to the end-user – both internally with staff, and externally with customers – apps have transformed business operations, levelling the playing field and giving smaller businesses a chance to compete.

In the banking industry, for example, not only are apps changing the operating models of established banks but the market is seeing the rise of numerous new players – such as Mondo and Atom Bank – which are completely based on apps. Essentially, operating as a ‘virtual’ bank, they offer a more personalised and supportive user experience that is optimised for smartphones.

This is not isolated to the banking sector. Apps have been gathering momentum and are steadily changing the way our society and workforce interacts – from communication to shopping, healthcare to entertainment. Apps are now big business: the Apple store saw over 100m app downloads in 2015 alone, while Google’s equivalent store sold over 200m. Clearly apps represent a serious opportunity for revenue and can be a crucial component in any modern business’ go-to-market strategy.

Apps vs Applications: What’s the difference? Building a strong foundation

As Sungard AS customers, you already know that getting the underlying infrastructure right is critical, offering a strong and robust foundation from which applications can be delivered to an exponentially growing and enthusiastic market. It is, however, easier said than done. When it comes to ensuring your organisation has the right infrastructure to support its applications, there are four key questions to ask…

Firstly, what are your performance demands? For example, if you’re simply storing databases then you don’t need resources required for mining and analysing data. Similarly, if you’re using the application to support a data archive, then performance is a far lower priority than if users are regularly accessing the application.

Next, what level of protection does the data require? Do you have the appropriate security protocols in place? Clearly employee details, or financial results must be kept under heavy encryption but your organisation is unlikely to require the same level of protection for its canteen menu or Christmas party plans, for example.

Another question to ask is whether your organisation is operating in a field where compliance is an issue? If, you require customers to share credit card data then you need an infrastructure than can support PCI DSS regulation. Additionally, are there any geographical restrictions placed on where your data must reside based on the regions in which your organisation operates?

Finally, what are your recovery needs? Should the worst happen, what applications need to be prioritised to ensure the organisation can move forward? Which can wait? It’s important to consider not only impact to revenue but also reputational damage, for example – prioritising the recovery of a customer on-boarding system over the existing accounts of current users is likely to do untold harm in the long term.

Ultimately, businesses run on IT and nowadays that means apps and applications – both traditional and agile. In the plainest language: downtime in these applications means the business does not function. Having the right infrastructure is crucially important to the future of all organisations, regardless of sector or size.


Get it right and you’ll enjoy ‘appy days!



Apps drive Infra_brochure cover captureRelated content:

Your applications drive everyday business, but what’s driving your applications?

Download our Applications Drive Infrastructure brochure to find out more.

What does the GDPR mean for your business?

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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is likely to impact smaller companies as a recent study shows that 82%1 of SMEs are unaware of the new legislation and will potentially be hit with large fines when it starts being enforced next year.

The GDPR will replace all the existing data protection laws across Europe and shape the way in which companies handle, protect and profit from data. All businesses and not-for-profit organisations that process personal data concerning employees, customers or prospects who are in the EU and/or are EU citizens fall within its scope, wherever in the world the company is based and even if the data is processed outside the EU.

In other words, European data protection law will now apply worldwide, and businesses have until 25 May 2018 to prepare.

So what exactly is the GDPR?

Through the GDPR, the EU recognises:

  1. The right to private life as a universal human right and
  2. The right to have one’s personal data safeguarded as a distinct, standalone universal human right.

It is by attaching rights to an individual’s data separately to the right attached to an individual, that the EU can demand EU-grade data protection standards on businesses in other countries. The onus is on businesses to determine if they are in scope. As you are reading AVAIL, it is a safe bet to say that your company is within its scope, but to qualify this assumption, consider three simple questions:

  1. Is your organisation based in the EU?
  2. Does your organisation handle data concerning EU-based individuals?
  3. Does your organisation do any kind of business with organisations to which 1 or 2 apply?

If you answered yes to any of the three questions, it is most likely that your organisation is in scope of the GDPR. Unless you are confident your existing data handling procedures are already compliant with the regulation, this means action needs to be taken now to prepare for the May 2018 deadline.

There has been a lot of noise in the IT press about swingeing fines and GDPR is frequently portrayed as the new corporate bogeyman. It has to be said these fears are not without foundation: a two-tier sanctions regime will apply and breaches of the law could lead to fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is the greater, being levied by data watchdogs2.

However, scaremongering is not a constructive approach. The good news is that correct implementation of the GDPR will not only ensure compliance and mitigate the risk of fines but, more importantly, will give compliant businesses a competitive advantage. That’s why Sungard AS advocates that organisations consider GDPR a central plank of business strategy that has high visibility with the Board.

Our Resilience consultants have drawn up a 12-step plan to guide you through the process.

  1. Brief senior management

Ensure the board is aware of the changes to data protection law and how this affects the business.  Consider booking a Sungard AS GDPR Awareness Master Class for your C-Suite personnel.

 

  1. Kick-off a GDPR programme

This should be led by C-level executives (or heads of department in smaller organisations) and include the CEO, CIO, CSO and CCO or whoever is responsible for Compliance.  The importance of having IT and Legal people speaking the same language and briefing the Executive cannot be stressed enough.

 

  1. Consider whether your organisation needs to appoint a DPO

The GDPR requires public authorities and other organisations whose core activities require regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale, or that process a large scale of special categories of data to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) who will guide the implementation of GDPR requirements and monitor compliance.  The DPO should be the head of the data privacy governance structure, liaise with the supervisory authority (the Information Commissioner’s Office for UK businesses) and report directly to leadership. The ideal candidate will be IT conversant, and have good business acumen whilst also being proficient on all GDPR matters. Recruiting a DPO may prove time-consuming, so we advise customers to make this a priority.

 

  1. Update data governance policies and procedures to ensure they reflect the GDPR requirements.

 

  1. Analyse the GDPR and understand the legal implications for your business

Identify the risks associated with your business model and address them by means of adequate data governance. Where appropriate, streamline processes. Pay attention to processes that use personal data for profiling. Marketing, HR and Sales will probably need to adjust their ways of working to ensure compliance.

 

  1. Review your Record Management Strategy

Identify where personal data is being collected or acquired, the purpose for which it is being processed, and whether this data is shared with any other organisation. If this information is not currently available, a detailed investigation will be required so that all personal data and its flow within the organisation is accurately mapped.

 

  1. Run an awareness campaign in your company

Unless your business is a one-man band, you need to ensure that all personnel are aware and engaged in the quest for GDPR compliance.

 

  1. Challenge the basis under which personal data is stored, collected and processed

Review the more prescriptive GDPR definition of consent and determine if a new request for consent is necessary.

 

  1. Implement any necessary technical adjustments to ensure GDPR data rights are fulfilled

These are the right to be informed, to rectification, to erasure, to restrict processing, to object and rights in relation to automated decision-making and profiling and the new right to data portability.

 

  1. Review the current mechanisms for international data transfers

Be aware that the adequacy of Privacy Shield (which replaced Safe Harbour) is currently a subject of concern.

 

  1. Examine your supply chain

Ensure your efforts to comply are not undermined by engaging in business with non-compliant providers or business partners.

 

  1. Embed privacy in your operation

This is the only sustainable way to ensure compliance on an ongoing basis. GDPR is here and will be for the foreseeable future, even after Brexit.

 

Sungard AS can support you on your GDPR journey

Our consultants can help you initiate a GDPR compliance programme, develop the business case and establish a plan of action to gain competitive advantage by achieving cyber resiliency and regulatory compliance. To find out more, speak to your Account Manager, call 0800 143 413 or email avail@sungardas.com

 

Join us for a GDPR Breakfast Briefing

Sungard AS will be hosting a roadshow of breakfast briefings across the UK. Dates are currently being confirmed, but if you’d like to register your interest, please email events.uk@sungardas.com or call 0800 143 413.

 

About the author:
Rogelio photo_croppedRogelio Aguilar – Senior Consultant, Cyber Resilience, Security & Privacy – Sungard Availability Services

Rogelio studied Cybernetics and Computing Sciences in Mexico City, and gained an MSc in Information Security in London.

His areas of specialisation include Information Risk Management, Cyber Resilience, Data Governance and Regulatory Compliance.

He brings 20 years’ experience in the IT industry working with clients from the Energy, Financial, Retail, Broadcasting, Transport, Telecommunication, Legal and Education sectors in Europe and the Americas.

 

 

 

 

1 Survey of 821 IT and business professionals responsible for data privacy across the US, Canada, Asia Pacific (Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, India), UK, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain and Poland conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Dell https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/vn/press-releases/2016-10-11-dell-survey-shows-organizations-lack-awareness

2 http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450401190/UK-firms-could-face-122bn-in-data-breach-fines-in-2018

Ten steps to a successful recovery

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Just a few months into the year and with several high-profile IT outages – RBS, NatWest and HSBC – hitting the headlines, we thought it timely to share our top tips for a successful recovery with you.

Although ten steps may sound easy, following them involves a great deal of complexity and requires not inconsiderable resources if the desired Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) are to be achieved. It may be tempting to skip a stage but, in our experience, organisations that fail to address each one of these ten steps find their availability expectations aren’t met at the executive level or, worse still, the recovery process doesn’t work at all.

 

  1. Identify business availability requirements

It may appear to be stating the obvious but it is vital to ensure the specified availability requirements meet the actual needs of the business and stakeholders or executive sponsorship may not be forthcoming. Typically, customers tell us they either over- or under-engineer the recovery solution, investing too little or too much and not delivering the optimal recovery performance stakeholders across the business want.

 

  1. Understand business/IT risks

You need to know what business and IT risks your business is exposed to, by location and by process. Engagements with customers often reveal an optimistic view of risks, or risks that simply haven’t been considered – such as who is recovering the production IT whilst your team is carrying out recovery? Who recovers the business if your IT team has been affected by the same disruption?

 

  1. Map your dependencies

From an IT perspective, you cannot accurately scope a recovery project if you don’t know what IT and applications you need to protect and recover. Shadow IT implemented by other departments – a reality in more than eight out of ten organisations1 – exposes the business to significant DR failure risks. And you need to know which bit of IT is dependent on the other.

 

  1. Tier your application criticality

In order to arrive at the optimal solution in terms of cost and performance and align that to business expectations, applications need to be tiered according to their value and criticality to the business.

 

  1. Apply the right recovery technologies

Only then can the right recovery technologies be applied based on cost/performance and suitability for your applications, processes and budget.

 

  1. Document and automate recovery processes/SLAs

Recovery processes need to be fully documented, rather than simply hope all goes well on the day. Recovery instructions should be kept up-to-date, along with recovery tools and processes. If you simply do not have the resources to document recovery you must ask the question: Who will do it instead?

 

  1. Protect your data – export it out of the business

To successfully recover, your all-important data needs to be safely and securely exported out of the business and stored for recovery and archive purposes. The way in which this is done will affect data retrieval times and, ultimately, your recovery performance.

 

  1. Connect your recovery data to the recovery server/environments

Currently, no single recovery technology can recover a complex business. So, it is essential to create the right recovery environments that are compatible and in sync with your production IT to meet your recovery objectives.

 

  1. Execute clear roles and responsibilities at time of test/disaster

Time is of the essence in the event of a business interruption so it’s important to plan ahead to determine who does what and when at time of disaster. Which people with the right knowledge and tools will perform the recovery – assuming they are available at time of test or disaster and aren’t abroad, sick or on holiday?

 

  1. Manage the lifecycle of changes

Recovery planning and delivery is not a one-off event. You will need to implement a rolling programme to ensure the ongoing lifecycle management of recovery is maintained and fit-for-purpose as your business and IT changes daily. Even the smallest of changes can scupper your recovery performance.

 

A collaborative, outcome-focused partner

If all this sounds too daunting, Sungard AS can help. As a customer, you already know we are on your side as a trusted partner. We will work collaboratively with you to help overcome the challenges of recovery complexity, scale and lifecycle management which might otherwise frustrate the recovery of your complex IT environment.

Our value proposition to you is the Guaranteed Recovery of Complex IT.

Quite simply, we make the unrecoverable, recoverable, the slow to recover, faster to recover.

With a 35-year heritage in disaster recovery, Sungard AS’ managed recovery service is proven to deliver outstanding recovery performance and value compared to the rest of the market.

For the 12 months to October 2016, in every month bar one, which fell to 87%, our customers enjoyed above 90% recovery success2

To put this performance in context, outside Sungard AS, only 35% of organisations recover successfully and only 6% of organisations meet their own RTO recovery targets without a hitch, according to Gartner3.

 

If you’d like to discuss putting our expertise to work for you, call us on 0800 143 413 or email avail@sungardas.com

 

 

1 Source: Survey of 1,350 IT decision-makers across the US (400), UK (300), India (200), France (150), Sweden (100), Ireland (100) and Canada (100) conducted by Vanson Bourne – November 2016

2 Sungard Availability Services Monthly Recovery Management Test Success data, November 2015 – October 2016

3 Gartner Predicts Business Continuity 2017

Tame the Bear series: Cloud computing imposes a new world order

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tame-the-bear-black_400In the last issue of AVAIL, we featured Sungard Availability Services-commissioned Tame the Bear research into the impact of cloud computing, focusing on the financial services sector.

You may recall the survey, conducted by specialist IT research agency Vanson Bourne, questioned 700 IT decision-makers and 1,400 office workers from businesses in the UK, Ireland, France, Sweden and the US.

We now look at how these technological changes are affecting some other well-established industries…

Manufacturing sector held back by legacy systems

Technology is revolutionising the manufacturing industry with cloud computing playing a pivotal role in driving supply chain efficiencies and increasing product output while reducing costs. In a volatile global market, it also gives IT the flexibility to spin up and down according to demand. But much of the manufacturing sector still relies on legacy applications and attempting to integrate these systems with the new technology needed to bring them into the modern, digital-centric era is a complex task.

The upshot is that while 80% of manufacturers think digital transformation is vital, over a third of their employees believe their organisation is not committed enough to achieving it.

Promise and potential pratfalls for retail sector

Retailers find technology can be a double-edged sword. From delivering customer insights to helping them cope with often dramatic fluctuations in seasonal traffic and phenomena like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, it offers retailers great opportunities when things are running well. However, the flip side is that the sector’s heavy dependence on technology means the potential for disaster has also increased when things go wrong and consumer expectations are not met.

And while digital transformation is a priority for 88% of retailers, almost a quarter (24%) of employees do not understand how to use the shiny new digital tools their employer has provided to them.

Public sector has yet to get its claws into digital transformation

As for the public sector, the research suggests the public sector does not have the same commitment to digital transformation as their private sector peers. This is a mistake as it offers improved efficiency and effectiveness of IT – crucial in this age of the always-on citizen. This sector is missing out on the improvements made possible by digital tools, which could help transform perceptions of the sector and lure talent away from the private sector.

Public sector respondents expressed the biggest concern for security of all the sectors (39%) surveyed. But with government ‘digital first’ initiatives and the need to build confidence in Britain at every level as we broker our exit from the EU, the public sector cannot afford to lag behind in the move towards digital transformation.

Download the full report on how organisations in different sectors are handling the challenges of digital disruption here!

 

TameTheBear.com               #TameTheBear

Sungard AS enjoys success in leading industry awards

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We’re delighted to share the news that Sungard Availability Services has made the shortlist in four categories of the CIR Business Continuity Awards 2017, with two further categories to be announced on the night.  The awards have evolved over the years in line with the industry and are now as much about recognising demonstrable commitment to resilience, as they are about achieving continuity. 

This year, we are shortlisted for:

  • BCM Planning Software of the Year
  • DRaaS Award
  • Initiative of the Year
  • Resilience in Infrastructure & IT Service Delivery.

Meanwhile, the winner of these two categories will be announced on the night:

  • Contribution to Resilience and Continuity
  • Lifetime Achievement – longstanding Sungard AS customer, former Advisory Board member and industry expert Steve Mellish is deservedly in contention.

Deborah Ritchie, editor, CIR and chair of the Business Continuity Awards judging panel commented, “Now in their 19th year, the Awards recognise those business continuity, security, resilience and risk professionals whose innovative strategies and industry savvy make them stand out above the rest.”

The winners will be determined by an independent judging panel and announced at the BC Awards Gala Dinner and Ceremony on 8 June 2017 at the London Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square. In the meantime, the full shortlist can be viewed here.

 

AssuranceCM scoops top accolade

In February this year, Sungard AS’ AssuranceCM was named Product/Service Provider of the Year at the prestigious Disaster Recovery Institute (DRI) International 2017 awards gala in Las Vegas

According to DRI International, the world’s leading business continuity and disaster recovery training organisation, its Awards of Excellence recognise pre-eminent organisations and individuals for achieving a certain level of excellence in the business continuity, disaster recovery and crisis management fields. Selection is based on commitment to promoting business continuity to both the core customer base and wider market.

“Over 750 customers in healthcare, finance, insurance, manufacturing, and utilities rely on our AssuranceCM software to provide the business continuity and recovery services that are critical to keep their businesses running 24-7,” said Bhuvana Sundaresan, Senior Director, Product Management at Sungard AS.

“This award recognises our team’s dedication to helping customers achieve operational resilience by delivering unmatched service and continued innovation in business continuity and recovery.”

AssuranceCM is a complete, integrated business continuity management suite that offers planning, assessments, incident management/testing and reporting on a single, inter-connected platform.

In other award news, we were delighted that our G-Cloud services and our digital transformation services  were both shortlisted in the UK Cloud Awards.