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