Archive for the ‘Cloud Applications’ Category

@Cloud_Connect Santa Clara 2012: @SunGardAS Highlights and Happenings

Posted: February 27, 2012, 9:34 pm

Cloud Connect 2012The @SunGardAS team had a jam-packed schedule and exciting time at Cloud Connect Santa Clara last week!  In case you missed the conference, here are some highlights from the conference and show floor.

Cloud Connect was an especially exciting week for SunGard as we announced our partnership with Amazon Web Services to deliver highly available cloud computing offerings.  The first phase of the relationship will provide SunGard and AWS customers bi-directional disaster recovery services between the companies’ clouds, without transporting data over the public internet. Get AWS announcement details.

Holding down the fort at booth 414, our team met with show attendees to discuss today’s hottest cloud trends – including compliance, private cloud options, organizational readiness, disaster recovery in the cloud and of course cloud security.

Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, stopped by our booth at to give us his take on the conference, trends he was hearing and some thoughts on the direction of cloud computing as it relates to data centers. Watch video here.

 

During the conference, a few of our cloud experts had the opportunity to present on a few topics – both of which were well attended and well received.  Check out this clip of David Ayers, senior product manager of Cloud Services, previewing his presentation entitled “Taking a Private Path to the Cloud”.

Get copies of both SunGard Cloud Connect presentations on SlideShare:

We weren’t “all business” at the conference; we actually had a little fun too! Booth visitors were offered scratch-off tickets for a chance to win a MacBook® Air, Apple® iPad® 2 or a $5 Starbucks® gift card.

Frank Owen, IT operations manager and owner of  TechVirtuoso blog, won an iPad2 while Ron Hayes of Avaya Government Solutions scored the grand prize – a MacBook® Air! Unfortunately we missed catching the big win on camera, but don’t worry this reenactment we filmed captures all the excitement! Watch video here.

Thanks to those who attended the SunGard presentations and also stopped by our booth. For additional conference updates, photos and resources follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

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Posted in Cloud Adoption, Cloud Applications, cloud scalability, Cloud security, cloud trends, IT and the Cloud, Uncategorized

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ZL Technologies Transforms Business Model with SunGard Cloud

Posted: July 5, 2011, 2:31 pm

ZL Technologies Transforms Business Model with SunGard Cloud

For the last 12 years, ZL Technologies, Inc. (ZL) has provided large-scale record-management services to top global institutions in the finance industry.  They are specialists in records management, archiving and e-discovery solutions.

ZL’s business has a number of unique characteristics.  For example, firms frequently need to search masses of historical emails for specific information for litigation.  Databases quickly grow as institutions generate more electronic data each day and regulations specify how long records are kept.  Regulatory requirements for security and governance are tight, and regular audits of IT-vendor processes are required.

To grow their business, ZL developed Unified Archive®, a new SaaS offering that leverages the cloud.  The cloud enables ZL to grow their business, as well as meet unpredictable customer demand, without the need to build and staff new, costly IT infrastructure.

ZL selected SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services, configured as an on-demand, fully managed, virtual private data center, to support its Unified Archive application.  This IaaS set-up provides multiple layers of protection, including redundant firewalls, segregated Layer 2 networking and integrated virtual private network (VPN) connectivity—all critical requirements for ZL.  Under SunGard’s managed services agreement, we will monitor, patch, backup, maintain and troubleshoot to reduce ZL’s provisioning and administrative burdens.

Stephen Chan, ZL’s co-founder, termed our Enterprise Cloud services “a highly secure and resilient platform, based on IT security best practices, and architected for compliance.”  He said we are helping them “break a major price barrier,” which will let them”reshape” the economics of their solutions.

Chen said he looked at a number of competing solutions, but found SunGard’s to be the best fit for making their SaaS business model work. Also, flexible and elastic pricing, which turns IT infrastructure into an operating expenditure rather than a capital expenditure, were essential.

ZL is a great example of how a company can transform their business using the cloud.  We welcome them as a new client.

Does your company have special regulatory and security needs that could benefit from SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud offering?

Visit SunGard’s Cloud Computing Microsite for videos, case studies and a host of cloud computing information.

Unified Archive is a registered trademark of ZL Technologies

 

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Posted in Cloud Adoption, Cloud Applications, Cloud Business Drivers, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud security, cloud trends, IT and the Cloud, Uncategorized

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Building Cloud-friendly Applications

Posted: May 2, 2011, 2:05 pm

Today we hear from  Sarabjeet Chugh, Director of Technology Business Development (Cloud Services and Infrastructure)

Cloud adoption is progressing rapidly.  Many companies are in the process of determining their migration strategy, and most vendors are refining their processes to provide a smoother on-ramp to the cloud. 

Now that cloud is a reality, we need to think about how application development has to evolve to fit the cloud.  The application life cycle is broken.  Programmers write code, run tests and “throw it over the wall” to Operations, where technicians then struggle to accommodate the resource requirements of the application.

Old Code is Often Slow Code

Applications heavy from poorly structured code that requires multi-gigabytes of memory and have a huge storage footprint can run in the cloud, but the expense will become obvious.  Further, such applications offer few options and little flexibility to mitigate expenses. 

New Technologies Improve

A cloud-friendly application is one that can be deployed on any platform, locally or in the cloud.  To achieve such an application, new application development frameworks, such as SpringSource from VMware, have emerged that help to tease out the application’s business logic from underlying resource requirements. They also improve developer productivity by providing supplementary web services, message routing, authentication and application-level services, such as memory caching and contingency handling.

By insulating the infrastructure-dependent components and permitting them to be resolved in the production environment, the application can be more portable, reusable and maintainable.   For example, a cloud-friendly application could run in your data center but failover to SunGard if an incident occurs.  Similarly, server images could be transmitted to SunGard and brought up with full affinity and metadata information.

Does your company have standards for writing portable code?

 Download SunGard’s white paper, “All clouds are not created equal.”

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Posted in Cloud Applications, Uncategorized

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What CFOs Need to Know about Cloud Computing

Posted: January 11, 2011, 4:16 pm

Cloud team member Janel Ryan touches on what CFOs need to know about cloud computing…CM 

Today’s business environment requires CFOs to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.  Considering cloud computing, a CFO will likely hear a lot of hype, but the most important thing to consider in a cloud solution is “which business problems do I want to solve?”  Consider these:

Maximize Cost Efficiencies

From a cost saving perspective, cloud computing can preserve capital, turning a large, upfront CapEx into an OpEx.  Cost savings stem from providing a “pay as you go” model. 

Strategy

Cloud computing is not one-size-fits-all.  As you review your business needs and priorities, understand some applications will be a better fit for cloud.  The low barrier to entry in terms of capital outlay can make it possible for you to reach new customers across the globe.  Further, new customers can come online faster because resources are readily available and scalable. 

Improve Time-to-Market 

The scalability of cloud computing allows for shorter development cycles.  It lets your development team speed the time-to-market.  The resources they need can be made available with little more than an “I need X amount of computer power” request.  That means temporary resources needed for proof-of-concept projects or new product development can move forward without capital investment. 

Accommodate Unpredictable Demand  

Retail and financial business in particular are subject to boom times and quiet times in their business cycles.  Cloud lets you expand and contract IT resources in sync with those cycles.

 Your specific business priorities dictate what you need in a cloud, along with such considerations as data sensitivity, security levels, and compliance requirements. Only by keeping your priorities in mind can you cut through the hype and make sure your cloud provider offers the capabilities that matter most to your company’s success.

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Posted in Cloud Adoption, Cloud Applications, Cloud Business Drivers

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Should Email Live in the Cloud?

Posted: December 17, 2010, 4:36 pm

It’s a question a lot of people are asking.  Let’s hear from Matt Carey, senior director, product marketing, at SunGard Availability Services and one of the Cloud team members on the topic. 

Should email live in the cloud?  The customers I’ve talked to say yes, and the analysts agree that email is the #1 application being evaluated for migration to the cloud. 

Fact: 71% of companies will adopt cloud

Recent research  by SunGard and IDG Research among key decision makers from mid- to large-sized companies shows 71% of respondents will be operational within the cloud over the next 18 months.  Forty-size percent already have implementations in progress, 12% will be operational within the next 6 months and the remaining 14% within 12 to 18 months.

Fact: 59 % see email as the most popular candidate for cloud

Email rated as the most likely production application to be moved to a cloud by these same respondents, followed by CRM/BI/Business Analytics and E-Commerce/Transactional applications

The drivers of this trend to migrate email to the cloud are the economics and the elasticity.  The economic appeal is obvious.  It is a labor-intense application requiring 24/7 monitoring and management.  Because the cloud is elastic, you can turn-up or turn-down the infrastructure as needs dictate, rather than always support the peak scenario.

Right for you?

Regardless of what others are doing, is moving email to the cloud right for you?  To make that decision, you need to consider a couple best practices.  First, you need to determine your existing costs associated with hosting and managing your email application, so you have a baseline for comparison. 

Next you should assess internal SLA’s related to availability and uptime.  Does your IT staff or current provider have the skill set and management infrastructure in place to ensure the application is resilient and available to meet company’s needs?  Don’t forget to include your disaster recovery, back-up and storage requirements, too.

Still not sure if moving a production application like email to the cloud is the right thing to do?  Consider a Cloud Assessment from a third-party who can assess your environment to determine which specific applications are good candidates to migrate to a cloud environment.  Just make sure they have the ability to also manage the migration process.

 Will email be your company’s first application to move to the cloud?

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Posted in Cloud Applications, cloud trends

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