Leading financial adviser support group Tenet needed a cloud hosting provider it could rely on to support the mission-critical applications its advisers depend on daily. Having been let down by one provider in the past, its choice of technology partner to deliver a cloud solution was critical. With availability of paramount importance, Tenet chose Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) from Sungard Availability Services, our track record reassuring the company of our ability to deliver.
Matt Bottrill, Infrastructure & Security Manager for Tenet Group, explains, “Downtime would have a huge impact – not just on the service we provide our advisers, but on our ability to carry out our regulatory duties, as well as causing potential reputational damage. I can’t stress the importance of availability enough.”
As a driving force behind Tenet Group’s cloud strategy, Matt Bottrill was acutely aware his personal credibility was also at stake. He recalls, “We went through all the issues we’d experienced with our previous provider systematically and addressed them one by one, which gave me peace of mind. It was a critical meeting in gaining buy-in from the Tenet Group senior managers who were present.”
Sungard AS’s cloud consultants first gained a thorough understanding of Tenet as an organisation before designing a solution based on the best combination of its physical legacy environments and new cloud services to ensure seamless implementation and successful application delivery.
While ECS is hosted at Sungard AS’s London Technology Centre, Tenet has the added reassurance it will automatically failover to a geographically separate site in the event of an outage. This is particularly valuable as its ability to provide a full package of support to Independent Financial Advisors is a key differentiator for Tenet.
Tenet is enjoying many other benefits in addition to impressive uptime performance. “Apart from the resilience Sungard AS offers, there were all the obvious advantages that a stable, tried and tested cloud platform offers such as increased agility and that by outsourcing day-to-day operational tasks we have freed up resource to focus on things that add value to our business rather than just keeping the lights on.” As a successful, fast-growing company, scalability and flexibility were also important factors to Tenet, which has now deployed ECS to all its advisers.
Security and compliance were among the other vital considerations. “It is essential for us to know the security around the platform is watertight so personal information is secure, as compromised data could lead to fines and reputational damage. With Sungard AS that’s one less thing to worry about.”
Alongside Enterprise Cloud Services, Tenet Group contracts Workplace Recovery to give key individuals an alternative place to work in the event of its Leeds head office being inaccessible or unusable for any reason. “We’ve had a few different disaster recovery providers before and I was very impressed with Sungard AS’s Elland facility,” says Matt Bottrill. “Reliability and availability are a given with Sungard AS. Not just the cloud services but the business continuity provision too.”
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