Keith’s Foreword: A time for plans and projects

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