Ongoing investment in workplace recovery centres worldwide


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