I know people are always digging around for a good cloud computing ppt (for those of you not savvy to the lingo, ppt = Powerpoint), so I thought I’d post the one for SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services.

The presentation is an interactive one, meaning that there is a narrative for each section that is playable upon click. This presentation covers our cloud solution architecture, its built-in resiliency, scalability, and security.

Related Posts
For other posts related to SunGard’s cloud services, please check out:

1. Virtualization and Cloud Computing: Better Together
2. The Advantages of Cloud Computing: Blah Blah Blah
3. Cloud SLAs: The Put-Up or Shut-Up Conversation
4. Cloud: Build vs. Buy
5. Cloud Computing Solutions vs. Colocation Services: Which One Do I Pick?

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Virtualization and cloud computing: 1+1 = 3?

More and more data centers are virtualized

Obviously, by now you’ve embraced virtualization within your data centers. At the end of 2012, about 70 percent of all companies were running at least some application workloads as virtual instances. Confidence in virtualization has grown over the last several years as more resiliency features were built into hypervisors and virtual machine (VM) management platforms and companies have increasingly moved more of their workloads and more of their critical applications to virtualized environments. I found this one industry study that showed that the percent of workload instances of SAP, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL that were virtualized roughly doubled from 2010 to 2012.

Let me review the benefits of virtualization

I’m not even sure why I’m bothering to recap the benefits of virtualization. I guess it’s for the Rip Van Winkles among us. If, by chance, you’ve been sleeping for the last century, virtualization allows you to consolidate and run applications onto fewer physical servers, which drives up your server utilization rates and cuts down on your operational costs. Additionally, virtualization enables quick provisioning and deployment, improved workload balancing, and enhanced resiliency and availability by giving you the ability to dynamically move VMs from server to server.

What we are now figuring out (and some of you are more ahead than others) is that virtualization and cloud computing are a match made in heaven.

Vitualization’s benefits can be enhanced when VMs are run on a cloud service. More specifically, a managed cloud service.

For example, one of virtualization’s key benefits is that companies can make more efficient use of their IT resources. This benefit is compounded when using a cloud infrastructure service. That’s because cloud infrastructure services let you optimize capacity based on needs. Basically, you only have to pay for the resources required to satisfy the performance characteristics of your VMs. If you need more capacity or compute power, i.e., more of your users need access to the same application or your database doubles in size, you can leverage the cloud provider’s infrastructure to meet these new demands rather than build your own.

Also, virtualization gives you a way to easily migrate and balance workloads based on performance requirements. This is particularly useful when your workloads are unpredictable or vary greatly. An extreme example of this is the workload an e-commerce site might experience on Cyber Monday or after a major advertising campaign launches. With an on-premises solution, you would need to pre-plan and provision spare capacity in order to balance the spike in workloads. With a cloud service, you could ask your cloud provider to proactively add more capacity in anticipation of a spike in the workload. And once your activity has returned to normal levels and that spare capacity is no longer needed, you can reduce your requirements with the provider.

A few points for you to consider when migrating virtualized applications from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud service…

The most important thing is that you need to carefully evaluate the mission-critical nature of your various applications and their needs against the available cloud service provider offerings. Not all applications are treated equally, nor should they be. As a result, some will be a good fit for cloud and others a good fit for managed hosting services. Your personnel, customers, and partners today demand 24/7 access to mission-critical and business-critical applications. At the same time, you need to ensure the security and stability of those applications.

Because downtime leads to lost productivity, lost revenue, and perhaps the permanent loss of customers and clients, you need high availability and a reliable and predictable way to recover your VMs. That means your cloud provider must have the expertise and automation solutions to ensure that your availability and recovery time objectives (RTOs) are met.

If you have requirements for data protection or the need to meet regulatory obligations, you might want to pick a secure, managed cloud service or a private cloud solution. The bottom line is, you will want to review your workloads and determine which are best-suited for a cloud treatment and which may need to remain in a more traditional virtualized environment.

Related posts:

1. The advantages of cloud computing: blah blah blah
2. Cloud: Build vs. Buy?
3. Virtualization makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder, Part 1
4. Virtualization makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder, Part 2
5. Virtualization makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder, Part 3

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Look who I met at EMC World…a pretty darn good Mike Ditka impersonator…).

Their products look to be in whole or in part, unified. Whether it was Data Domain becoming the main storage or Avamar running backups, or a universal interface for multiple technologies, all of these signs pointed to integration. EMC looked to be taking the best of all their underlying technologies and putting them together (my overly simplistic view, of course). After a few discussions with some of EMC’s product managers, my thoughts were confirmed. This is very exciting to see because at SunGard, we have been working almost in parallel with this movement.

As an IT service provider, we are focused on solutions, not products, so we have been continually developing backup and recovery solutions integrating EMC technologies for years with the purpose of improving solution performance and the overall client experience. I think there are a lot of people in IT who have a tendency to think that there is only one way to skin a cat when it comes to business continuity solutions. First off, you probably shouldn’t skin a cat to begin with, and second, there’s a reason there are so many backup products. . . it’s because there are so many unique IT environments.

My own focus is application availability, which is why we have so many solutions integrated into our services. Varying RTOs/RPOs for different IT workloads means that a tailored, multi-faceted solution is optimal. We have solutions around ESX replication and SRM to meet RTOs & RPOs for Tier 1 applications with automated recovery that we manage completely. And often times we integrate with EMC’s Avamar backup product, which enables scalable growth through a per-GB price model for lower tier applications. The technologies vary, but what we provide is universal, continuous application availability.

EMC’s strategic plan unveiled at EMC World will undoubtedly help me at SunGard to deliver premium managed backup and recovery services at a much lower cost than an internal solution. Product integration means quicker recovery with a solution that scales better, using fewer resources. It was very encouraging to see that our homegrown product development was being mirrored in many of EMC’s product roadmaps.

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3 things you will want to pay attention to when choosing a cloud disaster recovery provider.

Cloud disaster recovery may be the answer

How do you overcome tight budgets and leaner IT staff when you are constantly being asked to do more with less? Well, you might consider “out-tasking” DR management by using cloud-based disaster recovery services.

Cloud disaster recovery services are being recognized for their ability to overcome limitations that affect some of the more traditional DR approaches. In recent years, for example, large-scale natural disasters such as Hurricanes Irene and Sandy in the US exposed flaws in infrastructure availability for many companies, as well as gaps in their DR plans. However, cloud DR services helped many companies recover during these disasters by providing off-site data storage, replication, and mirrored facilities.

Benefits of cloud disaster recovery

One benefit of using the technological capabilities of cloud DR services is that the cloud DR provider is responsible for the management of all backup equipment and storage systems. Since companies are constantly adding more devices (secondary site hot spares and storage devices) due to the increasing need for data, IT resources are being disproportionately impacted. Using a cloud DR service, however, the administration, management, and maintenance of the equipment in your recovery site is handled by the provider, not your IT staff. This eliminates the burden and overhead to your business.

A qualified cloud disaster recovery provider can reduce the time and drive down the costs of carrying out such management chores compared to doing the same work internally. What’s more, service providers will utilize documented best practices, dedicated and trained professionals, and invest in recovery automation tools. Unless you’re in the business of disaster recovery, there’s almost zero chance that you would invest in any of these tools yourself.

Don’t forget about change management

Another area where a provider could free up IT staff time involves change management. With today’s highly virtualized environments, and constant stream of patches, updates, and OS upgrades, keeping a backup site in sync with a production environment adds to an IT staff’s workload. Here again, a suitably chosen cloud DR service provider would be able to help. For example, a provider might institute change management procedures to ensure all modifications in a production environment are carried over to the backup environment.

One theme that I keep noticing after both major disasters and everyday outages is that many companies simply do not have the time or the staffing power to update DR plans and conduct tests on a regular basis. The results of one recent study found that 90 percent of IT decision makers believe their data is vulnerable in a disaster.

Consider a cloud disaster recovery provider

A suitable cloud disaster recovery provider could provide the workers and expertise to help evaluate risks, conduct a business impact analysis, and develop a DR plan. The provider’s staff could then help with putting recovery processes into place, testing the plans, and ensuring services can be restored in the timeframes needed. Out-tasking these items to a cloud DR provider frees up your IT staff for other work.

Considering these factors, cloud-based DR services offer an alternative to legacy DR approaches and are ideal for some organizations that could not previously afford to implement disaster recovery or found it to be too time-consuming a task.

To make sure your company can ride out the next disaster or outage, download a free Business Continuity Toolkit now.

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Cloud is not that new

Advantages of cloud computing: blah blah blah

Advantages of cloud computing are well understood

The challenge today is not the understanding the advantages of cloud itself. We get that already, it’s the best thing since the iPhone (sorry, Steve), yada yada yada, blah blah blah. Your business challenge is still the same as it was in the 90s, though: how do I affect bottom line growth? How do I scale fast to address unpredictable growth? How do I deal with a transformational event? How do I manage the IT chaos with a static or non-existent budget? Your CEOs worry about growth, you worry about the projects you have that can improve that growth.

So why do we all still care about cloud?

Because the promise of cloud is so…well, promising. We can leverage cloud to get out of the CapEx nightmare – it’s always better to use someone else’s money rather than your own. You don’t have to be as prescriptive about growth targets when planning since you can utilize a service provider’s infrastructure and scale as necessary. And, all of that gives you agility – reach more markets, reach existing markets faster, and be more efficient while you’re doing it. In another words, you can grow.

What’s the catch?

Well, sometimes cloud is a little too good to be true. What about your applications that you can’t put on a public cloud? Those that need security, have performance requirements, need high availability, etc. How about those legacy environments? Can anyone say “mainframe?” Despite rumors to the contrary, mainframe is NOT dead. There are a variety of reasons enterprises aren’t packing up all their applications and moving them wholesale into the public cloud. It might be controversial but, “it’s not all cloud all the time.”

A video describing the potential pitfalls on the road to harnessing the advantages of cloud computing:

So what are people doing?

Well, they’re evaluating their options. It starts with having a fundamental understanding of your business challenge. What are you trying to do? (For those of you who are confused on this see paragraph two above). Businesses face the same fundamental challenges – grow, be profitable, or die.

You need to understand that your IT environment will most likely be a hybrid IT environment. Notice I didn’t say, “Hybrid Cloud.” Most enterprises will have to maintain mixed infrastructures of heterogenous environments. For those that need the translation: at least one of these things is not like the other.

(het·ero·ge·neous. adjective \ˌhe-tə-rə-ˈjē-nē-əs, ˌhe-trə-, -nyəs\: consisting of dissimilar or diverse ingredients or constituents ). Meaning that you will have a lot of old stuff that is stable, that you’ve already paid for, works well, has the security you need AND you’ll have some new stuff like cloud and hosted private cloud that you will need to incorporate. Oh, and they’ll all need to play well together.

The good news is you can have it all

So think about your business challenge and make sure you are asking the right questions when considering cloud – is it the right fit for your application? If not, what is?

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Cloud SLAs: one of the many potential pitfalls in your road to the cloud.

They are looking for a partner to help them achieve their company’s goal of ZERO impact to the business based on any outage. They are also looking for ways to reduce spending for hardware, maintenance, and administrative server functions. This line of discussion, of course, led us to what I call the “put up or shut up” conversation. You know, the one about cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of cloud SLAs. I just want to make one point about the various ways that vendors APPLY their SLA rules. Some providers offer a 99.5% (edited from 99.95% – thanks for the catch in the comments below, Dana French) uptime against the environment, which means your critical systems can be down for 1.8 days per year and your provider does not incur a financial penalty. But a separate consideration that many don’t think about are partial outages, which affect performance but do not cause a failure to access data. Did you know that partial outages are not even considered in most cloud SLAs? Considering that most critical systems are load-balanced or clustered, a site outage is unlikely, BUT…performance can be unbearable as you experience reduced capacity (because portions of the environment are out of service).

Our SunGard AS cloud SLA is on a per virtual machine (VM) per month basis, meaning that any one VM can only be down for about 3.6 hours. This commitment to individual VM uptime provides our customers with a greater sense of partnership knowing that we are putting our finances behind keeping each VM operational, and not just the majority of the site. When looking at cloud SLA’s, therefore, I urge you to look beyond the number of 9’s in the guaranteed uptime percentage and really delve into what event starts the timer, and what will be the overall impact to your business.

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It’s not about doing more with less anymore. It’s about doing even more, with even less. We hear from our customers all the time that their IT departments are under intense pressure these days to deliver more services, in faster timeframes, with smaller budgets and leaner staff. Most face the challenge of data center transformation, which is changing the way they think about their business. A driving force in the transformation is the need to get out from under the burden of aging infrastructure, which is causing many companies to look at alternatives to traditional on-premises data center approaches, i.e., colocation and cloud-based infrastructure services.

But how do you know which one is best for you? The answer is, it depends on what your needs are. Colocation and cloud offer some comparable benefits, but each is best suited to satisfy different scenarios. For example, both help cut some costs through the use of shared facilities, but the choice of one versus the other should be based on your specific requirements.

What’s colocation?

With colocation, companies own, use, and maintain their own equipment, but share the cost of power, cooling, communications, and data center floor space with other tenants. Colocation is a good choice for you if you need complete control over your equipment. This might be the case if you must have that level of control to satisfy regulatory or data protection requirements based on your industry, for example.

Another common reason to use colocation is to address the limitations of an existing data center. One industry survey found that 36 percent of data center facilities will soon run out of space, power, or cooling capacity. Rather than building a new data center, therefore, you can augment your current center by using space in a colocation facility. Additionally, some of our customers use colocation to have a secondary site for disaster recovery purposes, avoiding the need to build an entire second data center.

Two points to keep in mind with colocation

First, colocation still requires you to purchase your own servers, storage, switches, and software. Second, your IT staff’s time will still be taken up by monitoring and managing the equipment and conducting backups and maintenance. However, many providers also offer managed services that can be leveraged to monitor and manage your infrastructure. Look for a provider that offers a la carte options so you can choose what functions you want a third party to manage and which you want to maintain control over.

How are cloud services different?

There are some distinct differences with a cloud-based infrastructure service. Like colocation, cloud-based infrastructure services offer cost savings through the use of a shared facility. But there the resemblance ends. With cloud services, the cloud provider supplies and manages your full hardware infrastructure, including servers, storage, and network elements. This eliminates your CAPEX costs and cuts OPEX costs, since the provider’s staff, not your IT staff, are responsible for day-to-day administration, routine maintenance, troubleshooting, and problem resolution.

Why cloud services?

You might turn to cloud services for a number of reasons. Many of our customers simply want to offload infrastructure management chores to us to free up their IT staff to work on projects that would help grow the business. Some companies select a cloud provider because they like the flexibility of being able to rapidly scale capacity up or down based on business needs.

Three points to keep in mind with cloud services

That said, there are three points to consider when selecting cloud services providers. If your company is subject to data privacy and protection regulations such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, or financial mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley, you will want your cloud provider to be able to demonstrate compliance, have appropriate certifications, maintain a high level of physical and cyber security, and follow mandated procedures to pass an audit. Ultimately, the thing to remember is that the burden of compliance still lies with YOU.

A second point to consider is availability. Running a critical business application on a service that is prone to outages will not be acceptable. You will need a cloud provider that offers services with availability guarantees based on service level agreements, as well as an understanding of how the provider controls access into the environment, manages infrastructure resources, and addresses change management.

One final point to consider is how your cloud provider resolves problems. Is their staff available 24/7? What processes does your service provider follow to resolve issues and mitigate human error?

Cloud vs. Colo: The Bottom Line

Colocation and cloud services offer you alternatives to traditional in-house data center approaches. Based on the specific requirements of your particular deployment, each offers unique benefits and each has its own points to consider. You will want to weigh your compliance and privacy needs, your need for direct control, as well as your need for always-on availability and uptime when deciding between colocation and cloud.

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Talk about everything tending towards entropy…

What IS change management, anyway?

Change management, from a recovery perspective, is the process of reflecting the changes you make in your IT production environment into your IT disaster recovery environment. This is so that if you ever DO need your recovery environment – knock on wood – it will still be compatible with your production environment and you have the right servers, hypervisors, operating systems, network, and storage connected to your data. Without an IT disaster recovery environment that mirrors your IT production environment, your recovery will likely fail.

Over time, however, we all know that even keeping up with IT production change management is a challenge. (Every IT Director or IT Manager dreads the nightmare scenario of the seemingly innocuous change made at 3am on Sunday morning that ends up taking down the entire environment.) Without rigorous change management processes, the process of unfurling the damage is pretty darn difficult. So if most IT staffs don’t even have time for PRODUCTION change management, can you imagine how often they would have time for RECOVERY change management? Yeah: NEVER.

So what the heck is the second law of thermodynamics?

The second law of thermodynamics states, in a nutshell, that everything tends towards entropy, because “isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy.” ⇐This last sentence comes from Wikipedia, and was written by people far smarter than me. However, it’s just a fancy of way of saying that everything always devolves to the lowest level of effort. That being the case, the second law of thermodynamics also explains why my house is always a mess and why it’s so hard to stick to a diet. Given that it takes work and effort to clean up my house, the easiest thing to do is to push off any tidying up until the next day…and the next…and the next. Given that it takes time and effort to make and toss a salad and go to the gym, the easiest thing to do is just to pull out the chips and guacamole for a quick lunch on the couch.

This is also the same reason why IT staffs almost never perform change management for their recovery environments. It’s always #21 on a 20-item to-do list, and no one ever gets through their to-do lists. Bottom line is, it takes too much effort to rigorously record production changes and ensure they are flowed into recovery. Therefore, it never happens.

So what can be done about it?

I bring this up because at SunGard AS, we have a service offering called the Managed Recovery Program (MRP) that can help reverse the tide. I like this little video describing exactly how MRP works:

Just like cleaning your house, or sticking to a health regimen, you may need outside help to get results. Just as you might hire a housekeeper or part-time cleaning lady for your house, or a personal trainer or dietician for your body, you might leverage SunGard’s MRP for change management. You get to augment your staff with a dedicated Service Delivery Manager, whose primary job is to ensure that change management happens as a part of the lifecycle of your disaster recovery program. To do this more effectively, we have developed tools like a recovery configuration management database, or CMDB, that make the change management process much, much easier. With a few clicks of a mouse, you can easily notify your Service Delivery Manager of a single change (like a memory upgrade to a server) or even a bulk change (like the fact that you’ve upgraded multiple servers to Windows 2008 from Windows 2003). Check out our video demo-ing how change management is made easy:

A bonus of this new tool – which we’ve customized for the recovery use case – is that you can easily visualize your IT production environment as well, including any application interdependencies. Now isn’t that coming a long way from doing this via spreadsheet? Check out the video below to see how:

The best part is…SunGard MRP customers get to take advantage of these tools for no additional charge. It’s part of the service we provide.  Now, I suppose it’s time for me to resist the natural pull of the second law of thermodynamics and finish up this blog post, get off the couch, and go for an afternoon run!

The post Why Doesn’t IT Perform Better Change Management for Disaster Recovery? The Answer Lies in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery professionals tend to be perceived as the “Chicken Littles” of the world. We’re always running around exhorting people to be prepared for the “unthinkable.” Sadly, the unthinkable happened in Boston last week. Tragedies like these can take a psychological toll that lasts far beyond the time it takes for you to get back into your building once the “Do Not Cross” tape is taken down. People are companies’ most important assets, as they are the ones who help get the systems, databases, and applications back up and running — and they are frequently the ones most overlooked when companies are building their business continuity or disaster recovery plans.

I am encouraged to see that more and more often, companies ARE including their workforce in their BC/DR plans. What happened in Boston got me thinking more and more about cases where your IT systems are up and running, your building is undamaged, there is no physical reason why your employees cannot enter the building, and yet your employees STILL require somewhere else to work. You might be thinking, “How can this be?”

Well, think about what happened in Boston – let’s imagine that your company had offices near the site of the explosions, or within the perimeter of the lockdown. First of all, your employees COULD NOT have returned to work due to the initial investigation, followed by the order to stay home on Friday, April 19th (which affected nearly 5 million Bostonians and cost the city some $333 million, according to some conjecture by Bloomberg Businessweek). But there is also a psychological cost, in addition to the financial: wouldn’t it be understandable if some of your employees were reluctant to return to “the scene of the crime,” due to the fears and memories they may still retain?

I have another example from several years ago. I was working for a Silicon Valley company whose accounting department was moved to a multi-story building away from the main campus due to lack of space. When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck, most of the employees were so shaken (no pun intended) that they wouldn’t return to the building. A skeleton staff returned to recover essential functions like payroll and accounts receivable until alternate work space was located. And because this event could have seriously impacted our financial future, I got the funding that I had requested the previous summer to put together my first ever disaster recovery plan – that included people.

Dr. Robert Chandler, director of the Nicholson School of Communication, has stated that employees might be emotionally blocked from entering a building if it triggers unpleasant memories. In addition to the examples above, an act of workplace violence such as an active shooter incident could also keep employees away from their workplace. Dr. Chandler talks about how the cameras focus on the SWAT team and the shooter, but completely ignore the survivors who, after entering the building, go into their office or cubicle, curl up, and cry.

While we’re on the topic of workplace violence, I will just mention that there are many actions that you can take to minimize the risk, even if you cannot 100% guarantee it will not happen. For example, new-hire and ongoing background checks, physical security, and employee harassment training are obvious requirements that are sometimes mandated. I also recommend that you consider active shooter response training and exercises, pre-arranged employee counseling services (perhaps as an extension of your EAP program), and adding work area recovery to your BC plan.

But no matter the actual cause, there are good reasons to have alternate workspace in the event of a disaster. Depending on the industry in which your company is engaged, work-from-home or work-from-Starbucks® might not be appropriate strategies. Your company might be in an industry where your employees cannot work in a non-private place like home or their local coffee shop due to regulations like HIPAA or other mandates for information security.

We can never guarantee against the unthinkable. But we CAN prepare and get our employees the help and resources they need to come out the other end of the dark tunnel. We owe it not only to our employer, but also to our co-workers.

Finally, I want to say that my heart, thoughts, and prayers are with the victims, our courageous law enforcement officers, and everyone else affected by the Boston tragedies. May all of you all get whatever assistance you need to come back into the light.

The post Planning for the Unthinkable: Don’t Forget About Your Workforce in Your Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

When I joined SunGard a year and a half ago, I had a very clear charter: to extend our business continuity/disaster recovery software offering and use it to usher in a new era of business continuity assurance. We decided to do this by putting the customer at the center of our product development process. We literally met with hundreds of our customers to understand their pain points, challenges, and future needs. Consequently, we learned a VERY important lesson – one that has served as our “North Star” as we built this product: it’s not just about sitting down to create a knee-jerk business continuity plan to fulfill a compliance requirement. It IS about business outcomes, being operationally resilient, and instilling a sense of confidence that those outcomes can be achieved for business leaders and business continuity professionals alike.

Over the course of the last 15 months, our customers have invested their valuable time with us prototyping, designing, and every 3 weeks, joining us to observe our latest and greatest software build. For that, I’d like to thank them – without their insight and help, we could never have created something that so well addresses their specific needs. The good news is that my team and I will continue to work with them every day – the true business continuity and disaster recovery heroes – to take their guidance and feedback directly into the product. Hear from SunGard’s disaster recovery and business continuity customers on what their experience was like to help us create this new product.

Speaking of which, what is this next-generation business continuity/disaster recovery software called? It’s SunGard Assurance^CM, and we are unveiling it at DRJ Spring World 2013 in Orlando today – so if you happen to be there, stop by our booth to see what we’ve been up to. We will be making SunGard Assurance^CM generally available as a Software-as-a-Service offering on May 31, 2013.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Has Changed

Since the 1980s, business continuity management has seen numerous shifts in regulatory pressures, from data center recovery and Y2K, to terrorism and now state-sponsored cyber threats.  Each issue has forced our customers to react swiftly to address these shifts. In addition to ever-increasing pressures from regulators, business leaders today are demanding broader participation in the planning process and increased confidence that today’s plans will lead to better outcomes, These changes are driving a need for a new business continuity approach.  Successful solutions must therefore avoid the hazards of all past approaches.

The new approach must be enable business continuity and disaster recovery planners to capture valuable input from less “technical” novice planners (we call them the “Innocent Bystanders”) AND operate under a shrinking service budget. This means less of a focus on static plans and templates – and by the way, if you’d like a free disaster recovery plan template, we’re happy to provide one to you – and more of a focus on a solution that is visual, logical, and smart enough to anticipate hazards that could cause companies to detour from their destination, which is positive business outcomes.

As I mentioned earlier, we started from the perspective that it wasn’t just about compliance. Business Continuity Assurance has to go beyond that to deliver what ultimately matters the most for our customers:  better outcomes and increased confidence.  Business continuity and disaster recovery professionals uniformly told us that for them, it’s about engaging the whole company to find the vulnerabilities that matter so that they can guide the next best action, expect change and accommodate it often, and then take what they’ve learned back into the planning cycle and share it across the company. This is how confidence in plans is created and better outcomes are delivered.

The post Ushering in the New Era of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Software with SunGard AssuranceCM appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Today, businesses must deal with expanding data volumes, the added complexity of highly virtualized IT environments, and a growing number of regulations and laws regarding data preservation and retention.

These factors make data backup more complex, time-consuming and critical than ever before. As a result, the staff time required and cost to perform backups are both increasing.

With the lingering tough economic conditions, tight IT budgets and IT staffs being asked to do with fewer resources, it is time to take a closer look at backup operations and evaluate available options. What many businesses will find is that a managed service approach, which was perhaps dismissed in the past as being too costly, might be the best choice today. The reason: There are significant hidden costs associated with their in-house backup operations. And these costs are increasing as data volumes and retention regulations grow.

Let’s take a look at some of the in-house backup costs that are often overlooked or under-estimated:

Businesses must incur the expense of developing and testing backup strategies, selecting and deploying solutions and training staff in backup technology and procedures. And they need to pay to have staff available around the clock to conduct backup operations and respond to problems.

As data volumes grow, more backup hardware must be added. Beyond the CAPEX costs to acquire the additional hardware, there are many operational costs to consider. More data means more backup devices to manage and maintain and longer backup run times.

Then there are software costs. Most backup software vendors charge for licenses based on capacity. Several industry studies have found that data volumes for organizations tend to grow by 20 to 40 percent year over year. So when evaluating the costs of in-house backup, businesses must include annual increases for backup software license fees. Beyond licensing fees, business must pay ongoing annual maintenance fees for the backup software. These fees increase with additional capacity.

Today, many businesses use deduplication technology to help rein in the volume of data that must be stored and backed up. While deduplication reduces storage requirements significantly and therefore slashes overall storage costs, deduplication software nonetheless comes with its own up-front costs, including the initial software license cost. As with the backup software itself, deduplication software vendors require businesses to pay more for software licenses as storage requirements increase. And deduplication software vendors require ongoing software maintenance fees.

All of these hidden costs can add up. And most of them are eliminated or reduced when using a managed backup service.

In fact, there are many advantages to using a managed service for backup. To start, CAPEX costs for backup equipment are eliminated. OPEX costs of developing a backup plan, training, and operating the equipment and running the operations are eliminated or greatly reduced, compared to performing the same tasks in-house.

Rather than buying and operating a system based on the anticipated needs for the next three years, a managed backup service lets businesses pay for the backup capacity they need today, and add capacity as needs grow over time.

Additionally, using a managed service frees up data center space; the facilities and electricity charges to power and cool backup equipment are passed on to the provider. Further, a suitably selected provider can provide the expertise needed to comply with new data retention regulations or simply ensure data is preserved for any future eDiscovery efforts.

Learn more about SunGard Backup and Replication services.

The post The Hidden Cost of In-House Backup appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Our feature story outlines the key availability lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy. Companies of all sizes faced incredible IT recovery challenges due to unprecedented flooding, prolonged power outages, extensive property damage and logistical problems caused by wide-scale road closures. Learn more about the lessons SunGard learned in working with its customers before, during and after Sandy.

To start off 2013 on the right foot, we take a look at the major IT availability issues facing companies in the year ahead. One thing is quite clear: IT resiliency will be more critical than ever before. The reason? Businesses today have a low tolerance for downtime, and it is getting lower all the time. Read on to find out what you need to know face a new year filled with IT challenges and changes.

SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) deliver world-class IT infrastructure and operational support. Now, in addition to multi-tenant cloud services, SunGard offers dedicated, private cloud environments for applications requiring higher levels of protection. Get the details here.

What availability topics are of interest to you? What are the top issues your business faces in 2013? What topics would you like to see us address in future communications to you? Take our brief survey and let us know what you think.

In our latest customer spotlight, we take a look at McKesson Corporation, who quickly met its deadline for product rollout and delivered a highly reliable disaster recovery solution to its customers as part of its software-as-a-service offering for physician practices.

Finally, we bring you the latest news coverage on SunGard and an overview of events coming in the next three months.

Stay on top of the latest SunGard news with the INSIDER, found here on the SunGard website each month.

The post February INSIDER focuses on 2013 Predictions, Lessons Learned from #HurricaneSandy, a new customer survey and more… appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

The 2012 hurricane season has thankfully come to an end and now is the time for businesses to prepare for winter storms. As some parts of North America have been experiencing a milder winter, winter storms can still and will occur – take winter storm Nemo that plagued the Northeast in early February for example.

On average, the United States has roughly four catastrophic winter storms annually with storms occurring most commonly in the northeastern United States. Being prepared is key, in some ways, winter storms can be the most challenging weather systems because they spawn so many types of emergencies.

Blizzards, electrical storms, hail, high winds, ice, sleet, and snow can contribute to communications failures, power outages, and risks to your buildings. Storms also lead to many driving accidents and you can lose critical personnel to injuries from slips and falls.

You need to prepare for all events that may occur, from damage to buildings to your business to your people. All three need to be part of the business continuity plan and part of the testing of your plan. As companies strive to meet the demand for continuous service, they expect 24/7/365 availability. However, the average organization’s requirement for recovery time objective (RTO) from an outage now ranges between two and 24 hours.

To help better protect your organization from the impact of winter storms, below you will find a checklist to gauge where you stand on preparing for winter storms. As you read the list, consider the impact each of the items would have, if they occurred, on your operations.

Building:

• Building managers unable to get to the building to assess and mitigate damage
• Communications infrastructure failures
• Explosions
• Freezing and flooding of interior building areas that may result in ceilings collapse
• Gutter clogging with ice dams, leading to leaks
• Hazardous material accidents
• Power outages, causing building environmental controls to shut down
• Roof damage or collapse due to ice, snow, or fallen trees
• Structural damage or collapse
• Transportation accidents or closed roads that trap people in or out of your building

People:

• Communications issues
• Employee safety
• Lack of corporate presence during recovery
• Lack of lodging/logistics
• Not focused on recoveries
• Team players not available to travel

When it comes to the business itself, you need to consider a winter storm’s influence on several areas of operation. Run through this checklist and determine how you would satisfy these conditions if problems arose:

Business: 

• Customers expect supplies and services to continue—or resume rapidly
• Employees expect both their lives and livelihoods to be protected
• Insurance companies expect due care to be exercised
• Regulatory agencies expect their requirements to be met, regardless of circumstances
• Shareholders expect management control to remain operational
• Suppliers expect their revenue streams to continue

After going through the checklists and developing ways to address all of these items, you then need a plan of action to use once a disaster strikes. To that end, there are three major steps to begin the process of managing the incident:

1. Mobilize a central command center, activate a business recovery plan and identify exactly how long the organization will operate in a recovery state, and plan accordingly.
2. Following-up closely is the need for your organization to carefully document your processes, both in terms of how to recover and how to operate.
3. You also need to practice and refine processes using a variety of scenarios.

To help with these preparations, a free business continuity toolkit is available from SunGard.

Recognizing the potential disruptive dangers from winter storms, in our next blog we discuss the importance of developing and practicing a suitable DR plan.

The post Global Warming No Excuse for Lack of Winter Storm #DR Planning appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

A reminder from the NetFlix Christmas Eve outage…

It seems to be human nature to look for “silver bullets”.  With each new advance, technologists hold out hope that the challenges of the past can be put behind us. “This time it will be different!”  But more often than not each advance brings with it a new set of challenges in exchange for ones it solves.  This is certainly true of cloud.  It can reduce your risk, or increase your risk – all depending on how you approach it.

We must always anticipate service interruptions no matter what the platform or provider. They are going to occur, just as the sun is going to keep rising.  Whether simple human error, code bugs, the next hundred-year storm or an errant backhoe up the street ripping out your fiber, something is going to happen, and often at the worst possible time.  For many organizations, cloud services will provide immediate gains in agility and scalability.  On the other hand, very few organizations are going to find instant adequate fulfillment of their availability or resiliency needs by simply placing resources in a private cloud or with a public cloud provider.

The good news is that when done right, cloud solutions absolutely have a place in meeting or beating availability needs along with providing desired agility and economic improvements.  BIA’s, risk assessments, enterprise architecture and the other disciplines that have served us well for all these years in producing quality technology estates are as relevant to cloud as they have been to all of the platform and operating models that came before.  The leading cloud providers and solutions all offer a broad set of enabling services and capabilities to facilitate meeting the availability requirements that those disciplines help us enumerate.

The more mature platforms even offer a reasonably comprehensive set of features and options to build platforms that can run in multiple places as needed to ensure the ability to work around a problem in one of them.  Zones within regions within geographies, underlying snapshot and replication of storage resources, workload management tools for mobility within and across cloud providers, and experts who specialize in putting it all together; these capabilities and more are on the table.

There is always an uproar when a name provider experiences an outage of any kind. We often hold them to a higher standard after all.  But as unfortunate as their outages are, the end-user service disruption is really the responsibility of the cloud consumer.  It is up to each individual client to work with their organization, its partners, and their solution providers to put it all together creating and ensuring a comprehensive approach to meeting the full scope of relevant business requirements.  Equally important is that we are learning iteratively when we encounter an unexpected error, getting better every time.  Outages are a good reminder that cloud is only as good as you make it.  And that is where the fun begins…

The post Cloud is Only as Good as You Make it appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

The great appeal of cloud technology is that it shifts the economics of IT. However, the benefits must be weighed against the technical complexities and adoption hurdles. This is leading many organizations to evaluate their build vs. buy options, where the choice comes down to installing an IT infrastructure for a cloud effort or leveraging the cloud services or infrastructure of a third-party provider.

When making the choice between build vs. buy, both approaches offer similar benefits. Cloud technology lets organizations make more efficient use of IT resources, allows for the automation of many routine tasks, and easily scales to accommodate new IT service demands and business growth.

Where the build vs. buy approaches diverge is when organizations look at operational costs and the economies of scale.

Consider the cost of power. Electricity cost has become one of the largest elements of the total cost of running a data center. In 2010, it accounted for 12 percent of overall data center expenditure, and was growing. Today’s 24/7 nature of business, the explosion in the volumes of data that must be stored, and other business drivers require more servers, network capacity, and storage, all running and available all the time. This is driving up power and cooling demands to a point where electricity costs are now estimated to be about 15 percent to 20 percent of the total cost of running a data center.

To that point, one industry report noted that data centers around the world were expected to use 19 percent more electricity this year, than last. That represents a significant cost increase on its own. Worse, about 30 percent of companies say they expect at least one of their data centers to run out of power, cooling, or space within the next year.

Cloud providers can offer some help in this regard. They typically pay lower rates for their electricity since they are making bulk purchases. And since a provider’s cloud is geographically independent of the client’s business locations, providers also can locate their data centers in regions (country versus city, for example) where electricity costs are lower.

Compare infrastructure labor costs. Labor costs can account for as much as 40 percent of the annual costs of running a traditional data center. Certainly the adoption of virtualization is helping reduce these costs by allowing organizations to consolidate applications onto fewer servers. And cloud’s automation capabilities offload some chores that IT would normally handle. However, the complexity of today’s highly virtualized IT environments adds to the management burden.

Cloud providers offer help in several ways. First, they typically standardize equipment, thus reducing management costs versus managing today’s on-premises heterogeneous environments. Second, providers typically employee best practices and more automation tools to further drive down the time required to perform common tasks. And third, providers bring the expertise needed to implement new technologies. In contrast, an organization would need to hire, train, and retain personnel to embark on some new projects.

Additionally, there is an economy of scale factor. Since many cloud services are hosted on shared servers, a provider can spread the cost of labor over a greater number of clients.

Factor in security and reliability. Implementing a cloud solution for Enterprise applications requires expertise in security and availability. Security today involves the use of multiple solutions including antivirus, email and URL filtering, firewall, and IDS/IPS point products that must be managed individually, yet integrated to leverage their synergies. Many companies simply do not have the resources to deploy and maintain this plethora of solutions.

On the availability side, a private cloud approach similarly requires the use of a broad range of solutions and incurs the CAPEX costs to have spare hardware available in case of an outage, crash, routine service, or other event that takes a system out of service or when additional capacity is needed.

Service providers are often able to bring better expertise to security and high availability. And because of their larger infrastructure resources, they can more economically build-in the spare capacity needed to ensure continued access to applications. In addition, companies that leverage public clouds can turn up and down capacity as needed versus over-provisioning to accommodate for future growth.

Think about buying power. Here, it is all an economy of scale issue. Service providers can get discounts on hardware purchases of up to 30 percent over smaller buyers.

The bottom line is that while organizations can reap the benefits of cloud technology by building their own infrastructure, service providers can deliver economies of scale when it comes to cloud infrastructure, operating costs, managed security, and high availability.

The post Cloud: Build vs. Buy appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

In today’s 24×7 business world, application availability is critical. And catastrophic events (including natural disasters in major urban areas) in recent years around the globe have simply reconfirmed how essential an offsite option for production application availability is in any disaster recovery (DR) plan.

Fortunately, organizations using the popular EMC Avamar disk-based backup solution might be able to leverage their investment in that technology to create a true offsite application availability solution.

In fact, relatively new capabilities such as the inclusion of Avamar software in VMware vSphere 5.1, as well as enhancements to the core Avamar product suite offering improved integration with Data Domain and a media access node to support long-term tape archiving, offer synergistic benefits if applied to an offsite application availability DR effort.

With growing market adoption, now is an ideal time for Avamar customers to ask how best to establish a DR strategy, off that primary production backup investment, which integrates seamlessly and creates a true offsite application availability solution.

Here are some of the criteria that may help drive this decision:

Application tiering: Avamar is a disk-based backup solution that utilizes efficient, source-side deduplication capabilities to significantly decrease the size of the backup and the backup window. This enables bandwidth optimization in replicating a copy of that Avamar backup offsite. But the trade-off for savings in data footprint is balanced by data restoration needs. How do you recover the environment from an Avamar backup format to live system state? Application tiering takes into account the business criticality of the protected applications. The majority of IT workloads can be accommodated with an RTO (recovery time objective) of 24 hours or less, but some applications may require synchronous or asynchronous replication to a replica instance of the production environment running in a public or private cloud configuration.

2^nd copy utility storage consumption: Does your DR solution for your Avamar environment need dedicated infrastructure, or can your organization realize the economic benefits of utilizing storage as a utility?  The type of data, length of retention, size of data footprint, and organizational budget approach towards operating or capital expenditures typically drives this decision. Many customers can benefit from outsourced service providers running cloud storage environments capable of ingesting an Avamar backup.

Restoring your Avamar environment: Does your second IT facility or colocation provider provide computing resources—for both physical and virtual environments—that can be provisioned as a utility as well? This can prevent the unnecessary and redundant expenditure for dedicated compute resources to restore your environment in a DR event.

Managed services, when and where to outsource: Finally, what type of additional services do you need to best support your DR plan for your Avamar environment? Can you manage the replication of your network to your DR site internally? Is that best outsourced? What types of SLAs (service level agreements) do you need around monitoring and management of your backup and recovery time in the event of a disaster? And, most importantly, how assured are you that you can restore your Avamar environment at your test/dev or second IT facility? Will you have the staffing and expertise necessary to restore and bring up your protected IT applications?

Asking these critical questions can help you determine when and where to consider an outsourced service provider to offer you not just offsite disk-based backup, but true recovery for your Avamar environment.

The post Extend Your Avamar Backup Investment into a Disaster Recovery Solution appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

This month’s Recovery Services video focuses on Workforce Continuity/Workplace recovery in the face of disaster – a timely topic in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Another well-timed article details exactly what steps SunGard takes in times of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. What exactly does SunGard do for its customers when faced with impending crises?

For the CIOs in our audience, we spoke with SunGard’s Atif Malik about the importance of executive dashboards for CIOs as a way to achieve greater efficiencies in their data centers.  We’ve also got a few new services to tell you about — the Customer Configuration Repository – designed to revolutionize change management, as well as a new security solution called Single Sign On, available for all SunGard customers.

Our Cloud trend series concludes with a brief look at what happens once you’ve developed and tested an application in the cloud.

Finally, we recap SunGard’s involvement in the latest events and conferences, including the Gartner Data Center conference and our Business Continuity Software International User Group meeting.

Stay on top of the latest SunGard news with the INSIDER, found here on the SunGard website each month. You can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.

The post INSIDER focuses on Sandy, Security appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

If your company is like many of SunGard’s customers, your workforce needs 24×7 access to mission- and business-critical applications, many of which now run as virtual machines (VMs). Therefore, in order to keep business operations going, it is essential that you rapidly recover these VMs in the event of an outage.

In part 1 of this blog, I talked about the strategies for protecting VMs at an offsite location. To summarize, I noted that maintaining a replicated infrastructure at a secondary site is too cost prohibitive for most companies, while manual recovery using an on-demand hot-site is economically more appealing, but can be too time-consuming. So what’s a savvy IT Director to do to set him/herself up for the successful recovery of VMs? Well, this is an area where cloud-based recovery services can help.

Specifically, I would suggest looking into offerings that fall under the category of Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS). In fact, more than two-thirds of IT professionals are either actively adopting or at least interested in implementing cloud-based Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS), according to Forrester. RaaS can help reduce restoration times of VMs AND lower the cost of managing recovery operations, and I’d like to take a moment here to shamelessly give you a preview of a new SunGard service offering, Recover2Cloud: SRM (“R2C: SRM”) for VMware environments.

We are partnering with VMware and using their vCenter SRM 5.0 (VMware’s Site Recovery Manager) tool as the basis for our VM recovery-as-a-service offering for several reasons. First of all, for VM recovery, it is essential that the tool we, as a DR service provider, use is one that our customers are already familiar with and commonly use. Secondly, in addition to being able to manage failover between two sites with active workloads, SRM can also take charge of failover from production datacenters to disaster recovery sites. Thirdly, SRM comes with built-in recovery blueprints to make many of the DR processes and steps (discussed in part 1 of this blog) easier and quicker, helping to shorten RTOs, reduce errors, and enforce the use of best practices.

Now that I’ve given props to VMware and SRM, let me tell you what I’m most excited about in our new offering. As part of SunGard R2C: SRM, we fully manage the replication and recovery of your virtual machines, monitoring your environment on a daily basis. On top of that, we offer you a choice of Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – from 4 to 14 hours, take your pick – like a good DR service provider should. This service comes in two flavors (“Always On” and “On-Demand,”), and what I am most excited about is the way our customers have ingeniously managed to use the “Always-On” model (where we at SunGard dedicate infrastructure to the customer). Those customers who have chosen this model have been innovatively using VMs at their SunGard second site for a variety of use cases, from user acceptance testing to QA testing, all without interrupting VM replication processes. Isn’t that cool? (Obviously, I think so.)

It goes without saying, of course, that using the cloud for recovery effectively transfers your capex expenditures on a second site infrastructure into opex, and buys you and your IT staff time to focus on value creation programs – instead of worrying about DR, an admittedly high-risk, but low-reward function of IT. SunGard’s R2C: SRM offering is no different, and I’m thankful to be able to contradict the title of my own blog post and announce that “Recovering VMs is now a piece of cake with SunGard’s R2C SRM!”

The post Why Virtual Machine Recovery is no Piece of Cake, Part 2 appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

The way workers conduct business is rapidly changing, and as a result, there are new demands on network security.

To start, users increasingly are relying on Internet-based software applications to conduct business. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) use is up, resulting in an 18 percent increase in worldwide revenues from last year to this year. Facebook use more than tripled (in terms of percent of corporate network bandwidth consumed) and Twitter use on company networks grew 700 percent year-to-year from 2010 to 2011, according to one study. And browser-based file-sharing is now found on 92 percent of company networks.

Further, there is a blurring between work and personal life. The 24/7 nature of business and the increased connectivity and availability to business applications via the web has blurred the distinction between work and personal life. With little distinction, workers frequently use company-issued desktops, laptops, smartphones, and other devices for personal use and vice versa.

Add to that the consumerization of IT, which has taken hold in most companies. Employees, accustom to the simplicity and usefulness of their own smartphones and tablets, are using these devices for work. Increasingly, companies are even sanctioning such activities through formal Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) initiatives. To put the BYOD movement into perspective, consider that one industry study found that 44 percent of firms had a BYOD policy in place in early 2012 and 94 percent plan to implement BYOD by 2013.

These trends make it difficult for IT to weed out the good network traffic from the bad. For example, is a worker’s Facebook use for business or is it of a personal nature that might put the company at risk? Similarly, does a spreadsheet being shared contain information needed in an authorized transaction with a business partner or is it a collection of customer credit card numbers, accessed by an unauthorized employee, and being shipped to an accomplice for identity theft and fraud?

Traditional firewalls and network edge protection solutions such as Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems (IDS/IPS) have not been much help with these matters. They simply have not had the granularity to be able to segment traffic based on the application and the user.

However, with the introduction of newer UTM solutions and Next Generation Firewalls, network and user awareness has take a huge leap forward in being able to secure at the user level, as opposed to the port or the group level.

Such solutions help organizations in a couple of ways. First, they offer the granularity needed in today’s business environment. With a traditional solution, IT would be able to block everyone’s access to a social networking site or file sharing service such as Dropbox. However, business needs today may dictate that certain users have access to some of these sites or service. For instance, as social networking becomes a critical business tool, the marketing department would certainly need access. Similarly, a creative agency within the company might need access to a file sharing service to send advertising material out for review and approval.

The newer security solutions allow IT to designate which users or groups of users have access to specific Internet applications and services. The solutions also allow control at a more granular level. For instance, IT might let users access a chat function of a service, but not file sharing.

Most importantly, the newer solutions offer the flexibility to match the dynamic nature of today’s business environment. Specifically, using the newer security applications, organizations can quickly react to the needs of the users, proving selective access to needed sites and services, while still securing the network.

The post Fine-tuning Network Security appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Keeping the business objective in mind will serve you well as you make the move to the cloud. At each step along the way, you will need to evaluate a provider’s processes, procedures, and abilities to see if they fit your needs. Your choices must be based on how well a provider can support and meet your ultimate objective. With this in mind, there are seven steps to take to ensure success.

The post Stepping up to the Cloud [infographic] appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Three weeks ago, I flew to China to attend my brother’s wedding. My new sister-in-law is a local Shanghainese girl of great beauty and brains (I get to call her a “girl” because I am almost old enough to be her mother), and her wedding to my brother was a fusion of traditional Chinese customs and modern day YouTube phenomena…with hilariously enjoyable results.

Apparently, it is a Chinese tradition for the groom and his groomsmen to go and pick up the bride on their wedding day. The bride’s family, however, deliberately makes this process difficult, obstructing their entry and setting up several “tests” for them to overcome. In retrospect, I now understand why my brother called it, “busting my bride out of her bunker.”

When he and his entourage arrived at the bride’s home, they had to each down an 8-ounce glass full of a stomach-wrenching mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, and Coca-Cola. Then, they had to pass slices of cantaloupe to each other using only their mouths, which culminated in a few unwilling smooches between groomsmen. Finally, to gain entry to the bride’s home, they had to successfully perform the “invisible horse” dance from Gangnam Style.

Let me digress for a second. If you have not heard of the song, “Gangnam Style,” then you are seriously, violently, and probably irretrievably behind the times. You are pretty much something right out of the Cretaceous period. Propelled by YouTube to a worldwide phenomenon, this K-Pop (translation: Korean Pop) music video with a catchy beat and over-the-top, random vignettes has garnered over 722 million views (to date), and is the most “Liked” YouTube video of all time. (So that you don’t feel too bad, I was a fellow Triceratops myself until I went to this wedding).

Anyway, my brother and his friends became so engrossed in dancing to Gangnam Style that they did not even notice that the door to his bride’s home had been opened. In fact, as they were joyfully galloping in front of the house, one of the bridesmaids remarked to the bride, “It looks like your future husband is more interested in performing than in picking you up.” So when my bro finally finished passing the test and strode up to the front door, it is small wonder that the bride slammed it back shut in his face (!). That, of course, meant that they had to perform a whole new set of onerous tasks.

All of this hilarity was captured on film, which is why “Gangnam Style” became THE default theme song of their wedding…and also why we all found ourselves horse-trotting to it on the dance floor that evening.

I got to thinking about all this, and it occurred to me that there are several important IT disaster recovery lessons – heck, maybe even life lessons – out of this:

First of all, it’s important to keep your eye on the main goal, and not to get distracted. In my brother’s case, his main goal should have been to get into the bride’s front door, not to master the Gangnam Style dance per se. Similarly for IT professionals, it could be argued that their main goal is to support business value creation, not to be distracted by trying to master supporting functions like DR (disaster recovery) per se. DR is important, but only as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

Secondly, although the song’s writer and performer, PSY, has been a Korean pop star for over a decade, his cherubic face and portly body would have made him the unlikeliest of candidates to become their first crossover star.  In my opinion, what caused this global blow-up of Gangnam Style and fueled him to mega-stardom is an application, and one that was not even around 10 years ago. What am I talking about? YouTube, of course (what is YouTube if it isn’t a “ killer app?”)! Ten years ago, without the massively viral properties of YouTube, the song probably would have topped out on the Korean charts and went nowhere else. YouTube now blurs the boundaries between nations, races, and languages, such that we in America don’t even care that we can’t understand the song, we still LOVE it.

Similarly for us IT professionals, it can be difficult to predict which applications will have the most impact, especially in the context of downtime. We often think it’s the ones supporting revenue generation that are most mission-critical, but as this case study about a nationwide retailer shows, it is sometimes those “less critical” applications that have the greatest impact. For this particular customer, certain human resources and finance applications actually carried severe financial penalties that could exceed any revenue losses, should they become unavailable for significant periods of time.  It took going through a business impact analysis for them to identify these impacts, and only then could they begin to shift their availability strategies to account for the proper priorities.

If you can find any other IT or life lessons from Gangnam Style, please feel free to share them in a comment below!

The post IT Disaster Recovery Lessons from…Gangnam Style? appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

With a myriad of events just waiting to take down an IT infrastructure, recovering from downtime is not a matter of if, but when. That’s why Disaster Recovery Planning is a top issue for many Fortune 1000 executives.

Understanding their priorities can help everyone prepare for the unavoidable – before it’s too late. The survey shows where your peers sit on Disaster Recovery, including:

• Highest priorities
• Biggest challenges
• Outsourcing plans

If disaster recovery planning is keeping you up at night, gain insight into what peers are doing about disaster recovery by viewing  SunGard’s survey Infographic.  If you would like more assistance, use SunGard’s Disaster Recovery Total Cost of Ownership Assesment to help determine if an in-house or outsourcing disaster recovery is right for your business.

The post 125 Enterprise Leaders: Survery Results on Disaster Recovery Planning [infographic] appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Police, firefighters and EMTs from Moonachie, N.J. used the SunGard Availability Services business continuity center in Carlstadt as an emergency command post during Hurricane Sandy.

Like most other residents of the East Coast, I had been following the news about the approach of Hurricane Sandy vigilantly. As a New Jersey resident, my interest was even greater, as the storm the media dubbed “Frankenstorm” was tracking to make landfall on the evening of October 29 over the New Jersey shoreline and proceed inland.

When it became more likely that Hurricane Sandy would be as destructive as many experts were predicting, the storm was also becoming a concern from a professional standpoint.  As the technical service delivery manager for the Northeast region for SunGard Availability Services, it’s my job to make sure that our facilities in Carlstadt, N.J. – a town about 15 miles west of Manhattan—are operational for our customers during any crisis.

A week prior to the hurricane’s arrival, SunGard activated its three-stage hurricane preparedness process. As part of the process, we carefully followed tested procedures to help keep our employees safe and our customer data secure, our facilities secure and our communications consistent. Along with personnel at other data centers that could be affected by the natural disaster, our on-site facilities team verified that all environmental and electrical gear was in full working order before the storm.

We felt well prepared in Carlstadt despite the fact that New Jersey would face the full power of Hurricane Sandy.

On Monday, October 29, the weather worsened throughout the day. At about 9:30 p.m., I started the one-hour drive from my home to Carlstadt. As I found out later, I was the last person to drive through the local area just before the hurricane hit.

After navigating several detours, I arrived at SunGard’s mega center in Carlstadt—home to two data centers and a business continuity site, which provides customers with a fully functional alternate work space for employees to use while in disaster recovery.

At our Carlstadt data centers, we provide advanced recovery, testing, advanced replication and hosting for customers. That night, my colleagues and I were working furiously to assist customers. Some customers initiated an orderly process of shutting down their equipment, and we were able to control the situation so there was no customer impact due to data center issues.

We also had a number of customers at our facilities and we communicated with them personally and kept them updated throughout the evening. Additionally, there were multiple notifications from our Service Desk and direct phone calls to customers.

As this was happening, at around 11:45 p.m., we had some unexpected visitors. The fire chief of a small nearby town, Moonachie, arrived in his SUV with three ladder trucks, two ambulance squad trucks, and a police cruiser in tow. Moonachie was being overrun with floodwaters from a storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy, and the officials said they needed refuge and shelter for their own operations, and also for citizens that would be rescued throughout the night.

They asked if SunGard would open its business continuity site for this purpose, and I immediately said yes.

Within minutes, the fire chief had pulled his SUV to the front of the building, opened the back hatch and began using the area to respond to 911 calls and direct emergency operations in the field. Soon after, more emergency responders and the mayor of Moonachie, Dennis Vaccaro, arrived at the business continuity site, and the area became the command post for the duration of the night.

Those that were rescued from their flooded homes, and in some cases from the roofs of their cars, were taken to the SunGard business continuity center. Sheltered and comforted with sheets and blankets, they remained in safety while the hurricane and flooding lashed Moonachie.

In total, our facility provided shelter for approximately 60 residents rescued from danger, and 40 fire, rescue and police.

The Carlstadt facilities remained dry and operational throughout the storm, and I was extremely proud that we were able to assist the community in a small but useful way during Hurricane Sandy.

The post SunGard Carlstadt Business Continuity Center serves as Command Post, Shelter During Hurricane Sandy appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Virtualization offers many benefits that simplify application deployment and management. However, it complicates disaster recovery (DR) because it creates a hybrid physical-virtual environment.

In previous blogs, we’ve already discussed the implications of recovering today’s hybrid environments, the need to retain application tiering when developing a DR solution for highly-virtualized environments, and how virtualization potentially makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder. Today, I want to talk about what makes recovering even all-virtual environments a challenge.

Perhaps you’re confused. After all, some vendors like to tout how easy DR becomes with virtualization. Sure, provisioning, deploying, and even moving virtual machines (VMs) to new servers are relatively simple operations. But recovering VMs in large-scale virtual applications environments presents several protection and recovery challenges.

To protect and recover your virtual machines (VMs), you need to get them replicated to a second site. To create a second site, you can take one of two approaches, each with their up- and down-sides:

1. You can invest in a full replica of your production infrastructure at a second site. If a server crashes or a disruption occurs at the primary site, you can just fail users over to the second location. The problem with this approach is that it is extremely expensive! It is so expensive that most companies, in fact, cannot afford to have duplicate infrastructure sitting idly by just in case a disruption occurs.
2. You can rent infrastructure capacity on an as-needed basis. You can obtain these services from a cloud provider, or from a hotsite provider like SunGard; both kinds offer a “pay-as-you-go” capability. The downside to using this approach is that recovery can be time-consuming, often starting from “bare metal.” In many cases, this manual approach simply takes too much time and exceeds commonly needed recovery time objectives (RTOs).

To put the time-to-recovery using a manual approach into perspective, consider the steps that must be taken to restore a system from a bare metal state. You have to:

• Configure the network
• Set up physical servers
• Install and configure a hypervisor
• Connect to array replication SAN
• Present LUNs to hypervisor
• Register VMs with vCenter
• Configure VMs in vCenter

Based on my observations of customers on SunGard’s data center floor, this manual process from start to finish can take up to 38 hours for medium to large environments (over 100 VMs). Very few companies can withstand a 38-hour RTO for mission-critical or even business-critical applications (can yours?). Your workers would be unproductive, your customers would not be able to place orders, and your business partners would not be able to collaborate during this downtime.

With such a long downtime, the impact on the bottom line could be severe. One industry study estimates that businesses lose an average of about $418,071 in an outage. So, 38 hours of downtime could put a serious dent in the bottom lines of many businesses.

Certainly, there are ways to speed up the restoration process from bare metal. You might avail yourself of the various automation tools to assist, but you would still need to dedicate servers to use these tools (which incurs costs) and you would still need to adhere to best practices in change management to make sure that changes in the production VMs got reflected in the recovery environment. This latter point is particularly challenging to address, as the ease with which VMs can be created and deployed has led to VM sprawl, and many companies still do not follow adequate change management processes.

Given the challenges of successfully recovering VMs within certain RTOs, what are your alternatives? Stay tuned: I’ll discuss that in my next post.

The post Why Virtual Machine Recovery Is No Piece of Cake appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Apparently what’s headed for the East Coast is a “monster” of a storm. It’s so bad, in fact, that they’re calling it, “Frankenstorm.” The prediction is that this confluence of forces (including Hurricane Sandy and two other weather fronts) will combine to hit the Northeastern part of the United States the week of October 29 with a force and fury not seen since 1991′s “Perfect Storm” (which, coincidentally, also happened during Halloween week).

So what can your company and your employees do to prepare for what may be coming? If you haven’t already done some rigorous business continuity and disaster recovery planning, now might be a bit too late to start. But you can at least make sure that you have copies of your critical information in more than one location in case the storm damages or destroys your primary computing or storage infrastructure. And, it’s almost – but not quite – too late to locate and sign up for a cloud backup solution, even if you don’t yet have a way to recover your data. At least your data will be safe and you can worry about getting it back later.

If you do have a plan, you’ll need to dust it off and look up the part about “employee notification.” SunGard has a significant number of employees in the Northeastern United States, and we used our own SunGard NotiFind software this afternoon (yup, we eat our own dog food) to tell those potentially affected what the forecasters are predicting and remind them of what they need to do now and next week.

What we are telling our employees is probably important for any company, so let me share some of it in case it might be helpful to you. First of all, every employee should be ready at any time to live without power and communications for at least 72 hours, which means having additional food, water, clothing, and toiletries on hand. Employees should be making alternative arrangements to take care of dependents should they be isolated at the office (such as ensuring that their school-aged children are picked up and cared for).

Non-essential employees should discuss alternative work options with their managers, while mission-critical employees may want to make plans to be in the office or at their backup work site before the storm hits, fortified with enough resources to ride Frankenstorm out. Many companies have “work at home” plans for disasters such as this, but there are reasons why telework may not be the perfect alternative work strategy in a regional disaster such as this.

Some other actions you might advise employees take include:

• Update their personal emergency contacts (alternate information if evacuation occurs).
• Make sure they know where their family is and how to contact them. The best bet is to have everyone contact a specific person who lives outside of the disaster area. The chances are higher that their call will get though than if they call someone else within the storm area. (SMS usually works better than voice calls.)
• Update their contact information in the employee address book to make sure that their manager and coworkers know how to reach them.
• Review hurricane preparedness plans for both your company and personal situations.
• If you have oil lamps or generators, ensure that you have enough fuel for them. Make sure that anything that needs batteries has fresh ones available.
• Don’t forget that Voice over IP (VoIP), cable television, and cell towers may not be working. Even if they are, your cordless phone and cell phone might be out of power.

SunGard has been helping companies recover from disasters for over 30 years and we are ready when you are. Our own key employees have been briefed on the situation and are prepared to take our customers’ calls and help them recover. For us, “Frankenstorm” will be no different than any other disaster, and even though we hope you don’t need to call us for help, we’ll be here if you need us.

The post Frankenstorm is Coming…How’s Your Disaster Recovery Plan Holding Up? appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

The healthcare industry has drawn significant attention over the last few years due to the political climate in the US.  This attention has brought to surface the challenges these organizations face on a daily business.

In the white paper titled, Meeting the Demands of Healthcare Reform, we discuss how the healthcare industry faces a myriad of regulations, reduced capital investment capabilities, and technological complexities, while remaining true to their missions of providing accurate and timely care to individuals with medical needs.  Technologies used in patient care are expensive to begin with, but when you layer in the additional costs (overhead) of providing care to patients, you begin to see that the latest and greatest MRI is not the only reason medical expenses are so high.

McKinsey estimates (“Under Pressure: The Changing Role of the Healthcare CIO,” by The Economist Intelligence Unit) that new rules associated to Healthcare IT implementation will require hospitals to spend $100,000 per bed.  That equates to $274 per day per bed.  These costs will of course be factored in to the care provided a patient, but again, this number does not even include the costs associated to medical services being administered to the patient.  It should be no surprise why patients receive statements that show their hospital stay equating to hundreds if not thousands of dollars per day.

This industry has never been identified as an early adopter of technology, with the exception, of course, around biotechnology services. In fact, the healthcare industry is reticent to deploy new network technologies due to concerns around data protection.  To add another layer of complexity to this, healthcare and insurers are consistently consolidating and acquiring other firms adding more layers of complexity while trying to control their data centers and data center systems.

When you look at these challenges at a high level, you see that these challenges are similar to many different industries, but none are as emotionally charged as the healthcare industry. The good news is that regulatory agencies, state, and federal governments are embracing new technologies like Cloud Computing.  With this change, standards that focus specifically on these technologies which incorporate security and trust in network architectures are allowing industries like healthcare to finally consider data center transformation or even IT outsourcing.  These forward advancement will enable the healthcare industry to reduce their capital investments in IT, reduce their total operating expenses, improve their back office networks while still maintaining compliance and protecting their patient data.

The post Healthcare No Longer Suffers From Bad IT Medicine appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

We’d rented a cottage big enough for the grandparents, kids and grandkids, complete with a pool, a couple of horses and one giant Longhorn steer.  Along the way my sister stopped off in Bastrop, Texas – a nearby German community – at an authentic European chocolate shop.  She purchased a box of hand-crafted German chocolates that danced on your tongue and reminded your taste buds what heaven must be like.  We savored these special treats every night after dinner and coffee amidst the cool breezes and cicada symphonies.

This little chocolate shop was known throughout the state as the real thing – real chocolate made by real Germans, based on old country recipes.  Anyone traveling between Houston and Austin knew this was the place to go for a sweet treat that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

A couple of days into the trip, we received a jarring phone call at ten o’clock one night: Wildfires were spreading throughout the hill country, and we were to stay alert for possible evacuation notices.  Thankfully, we never got a second call.  But the next day we learned that the little chocolate factory had burned to the ground.  The place was annihilated; everything was lost – every spoon, every ounce of chocolate, every piece of special candy-making equipment from Europe.  The only thing saved was the owner’s special recipe book and around $200 from the cash register.

To this day, the chocolate shop is still closed.  The owner posts regular updates on his website, but the chocolates are a distant sweet memory.

What’s a small business to do in a situation like this?  Is any business too small to have a back-up plan?  How do you prepare for a disaster that comes out of nowhere?

In today’s technology-dependent world, companies of all sizes have to have a business continuity plan.  Not having a plan for retrieving your business files or connecting with employees, suppliers and customers is deadly.  I was reminded of this in reading SunGard’s white paper “Five Reasons Why Disaster Recovery Plans Fail.”  The little German chocolate shop had no way of contacting its customers or even its business partners.  The owner was left to using a PC and internet connection provided by his hotel.

First things first – personal safety and rebuilding physical structures matter most.  But staying connected to customers, business partners and colleagues is the next step.  The wildfires in Colorado this summer are a stark reminder of the dangers imminent in our unpredictable weather patterns.

In short, your business is never too small to have a disaster recovery plan.  Because as Forrest Gump once said, life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.

Learn more about Disaster Testing in this month’s edition of the INSIDER.

The post Fireproof Your #DisasterRecovery Plans, Because Life is Like a Box of Chocolates appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Michael Leiter

On October 15, Mr. Leiter will deliver the keynote address at the annual SunGard Availability Services Business Continuity International User Group Forum at the Chicago Marriott Downtown from Oct. 14 – 16. In his address, “Leading in a Crisis: Before, During, and After,” Mr. Leiter will share lessons on instilling leadership while managing a crisis and describe his experiences with helping manage scenarios that impacted the nation’s security.

The SunGard International User Group Forum is a symposium that offers peer-to-peer sessions on business continuity (BC), real-life case studies of disaster events and success stories of business continuity plans resolving operational disruptions. Attendees will also learn about implementing BC software in an organization and view the next generation of BC Software enhancements that will shape the future of business continuity management. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #SunGardUGF

In advance of the User Group Forum, SunGard asked Mr. Leiter for his opinions on leadership, crisis management, overlooked factors, and how enterprises can learn from national security threats.

What is the most important factor in leading an organization through a crisis?

First and foremost, it’s the idea that planning is not just for a predicted future. Planning is critical for responding in a time of crisis. It allows you to understand your organization, its surroundings, and what you are faced with. And when an unpredictable or predictable event occurs that throws a wrench in works, it is that planning which allows you to respond in a crisis and change the organization’s priorities because you understand it so well.

When is leadership most important when a crisis or business disruption arises?

I’m a very strong believer in leadership from the very top at all times, but especially before and during a crisis. It affects every part of the organization. Part of the responsibility of the highest level of leadership is to create champions in every part of the organization for your business continuity and crisis plan.

Your professional background includes roles in the highest levels of government, including at the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Even at highly organized organizations with respected leaders, do you find that crisis planning still has a role?

When you have a crisis, the best laid plans go out window, except for those pieces that help you understand how your organization can shift and change to respond to new situations. Also, in my experience, in terms of planning during a crisis, it’s critical for a leader to understand all components of an organization and what its capabilities are. Because unfortunately, no matter the organization, many people in the organization may very well lose their cool. The more you have thought about what the organization can do and cannot do, the better position you will be in to react to that time of crisis, to adjust to changed circumstances, and then reshape the organization beyond the period of crisis to be more effective when you have new requirements upon you.

How do you apply lessons you learned from managing major national security threats as director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center to business continuity planning for enterprises?

Let’s take the raid on Osama bin Laden [in May 2011] as an example. This was an undertaking that required an enormous amount of planning in the run up to the raid. At various intelligence agencies, people had been working on this mission for over a decade. They had been planning and thinking and identifying every possible eventuality. In this particular case, we knew when the crisis might arise, which was when the operation would be enacted. So in last two weeks before it became active, the plans were shown to an entirely new group of people who had not been involved at all. Everything was presented to them, and we said, “Come up with all the eventualities you can and tell us all things we might be getting wrong.”

Another example is the attacks in Mumbai, India [in 2008]. In evaluating security threats, it was typical at the time to always talk to local authorities like the police. In the Mumbai attacks, it turned out the attackers used fire as a weapon while inside a large building. This was an eventuality no one had thought about.

I think any organization can learn from these examples. It’s great to have intelligent, well-informed people involved in business continuity planning, but also it’s also critical before the finalizing that plan to step back. You want to give that same information and the scenarios to a group of people outside the organization who understand the problem, but who aren’t emotionally involved to the outcomes or the plan. The goal is to try to come up with alternatives to find where the planning may have gone off the mark and to identify the problems.

What are your recommendations for initial steps for building a BC/DR plan for an organization of any size?

You have to start small. You can’t plan for all eventualities and you shouldn’t start with everything falling apart. Start with a smaller crisis, such as what happens if you lose your company email. That can be a crisis, for sure, but it’s much different that losing all your electronic storage. In national security planning, we don’t start with a nuclear attack on Washington. We ask what would happen if there were a suicide bomber in Washington, D.C. and how we would react and handle that. It’s much better to start from a smaller crisis and build out.

As a former national security leader, you had stakeholders across a wide range, such as the White House, agencies like the CIA and FBI, Congressional leaders, and, more broadly, the American public. What advice can you share with organizations about communicating effectively during a crisis to all its important stakeholders?

One thing that immediately comes to mind is that it’s very easy to assume that you understand what a customer wants when a crisis hits. In the case of my own crisis planning at the National Counterterrorism Center, I tried to understand what the President, the White House and members of Congress wanted for information. But I found it’s much better to sit down and ask them, “How do you want this information? When do you want it? What information do you want first?  Who else do you think should be informed about this?” It may be difficult for some businesses to plan this way, but I think it’s important to engage customers and explain that during all these preparations to become well positioned for eventualities, you want to understand their requirements and what information they will want to know.

And internal communications is just as important. In my experience, the vast majority of people find this kind of strategic planning to be an annoyance. When you have a crisis plan developed only by the crisis planning team, it’s helpful but not nearly as useful as one developed by a broader cross section of users.

It’s incredibly important to engage stakeholders inside the organization and, sometimes, leaders have to do that with internal stakeholders by twisting their arm a little. You want to do that in a way that reduces the workload on them, but so that they understand it’s important and you need them. In the end, you will have a much better return on investment. If you leave any part of the organization out, it’s almost guaranteed that’s the part of organization that will open the plan for the first time at the moment of crisis.

During the crisis, it’s obviously about communication, communication, communication. If you can’t effectively communicate messages to employees and leaders across the organization, you could soon be faced with a workforce that thinks there is no plan. Your business crisis will quickly become an existential crisis.

The post Q&A with @SunGardAS User Group Forum Keynote Speaker, Michael Leiter appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Our video series on Recovery Services continues with a deeper look at the strategies behind Managed Recovery Planning, SunGard’s approach to taking the pain out of application recovery for complex IT environments.  Another series, our five-part serial on Cloud Computing trends, explores distributed block storage – one of the biggest changes on the cloud computing horizon.

For customers with unique availability needs, we sat down with Dominick Paul, National VP of Strategic Solutions, to learn all about the SunGard value-add.  Check out his video interview here.

With the summer season behind us and the first few weeks of fall starting to cool us down, the time is right to dust off your disaster recovery plans.  Finally, we take a closer look at the exciting array of fall events coming up for SunGard customers.  There are multiple opportunities to connect with members of the SunGard team this fall – we can’t wait to see you!

Stay on top of the latest SunGard news with the INSIDER, found here on the SunGard website each month. You can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.

The post October INSIDER: #Cloud trends, disaster planning and fall events on the horizon appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

In a recent session at VMworld, the question was asked: “Have you looked at DR to the cloud?” Of the 50 people in the room, more than half said they had not looked at it, but thought it sounded intriguing (55%). Another 10% responded, “Yes, it’s fantastic!” This seems to jive with a Forrester report I recently read that more than two-thirds of all IT professionals were actively implementing or interested in implementing a cloud-based solution for disaster recovery.

People who tout the cloud usually point to the benefits of reducing the capex and opex costs associated with buying and maintaining servers, networking, and storage elements. But with so much hype around DR to the cloud, I wonder if people are able to cut through the buzz and understand the critical truth: that when used for recovery efforts, disaster recovery in the cloud can definitely help reduce recovery times and lower the cost of managing recovery operations, but only if the right service is chosen.

Here are some of the things you’ve got to consider when deciding on a Recovery-as-a-service cloud vendor:

Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Beware the vendor who only offers you a single Recovery Time Objective (RTO)/Recovery Point Objective (RPO). With only one RTO for your entire environment, you might be spending too much or too little on DR. This is because you should almost always tier your applications into three buckets of importance: mission-critical, business-critical, and best-efforts. Each of those buckets should have its own unique RTO – usually with the mission-critical applications needing recovery times of under 4 hours, business-critical applications requiring recovery times of under 12 hours, and best-efforts applications taking 24 hours or more.

Some examples:

• If your vendor offers you a 12 hour RTO, then your mission-critical applications will not have the appropriate level of availability, and you would be under-spending.
• Conversely, if your vendor offers you a 4-hour RTO for all your applications, you would be spending too much on keeping those non-mission-critical applications available.

Ideally, your cloud vendor offers you a range of RTO/RPO options.

A Compatible Recovery Environment: Chances are, your applications are running on a mix of physical and virtual server platforms, hypervisors, operating systems, and storage. To further complicate things, your applications are likely interdependent – meaning that they rely on other applications in order to deliver a complete business process. As John Donne said “no man is an island”, the same can be said of applications… no application is an island.  Your recovery environment should therefore reflect your production environment and provide the same mix of platforms, hypervisors, operating systems, etc., so that you can bring up your applications in a consistent way, according to the interdependencies you’ve identified. If your recovery cloud vendor operates an environment that is too homogeneous, then you’re likely going to fail when you go to restore applications that do run on hybrid physical-virtual stacks.

Managed Services:  Data protection is not disaster recovery!  If you think, “I’m backing up my data to the cloud, so I’m covered for DR,” then you’re in for a nasty surprise if you should ever experience the need to recover.  All you’ve done is protect your data, which is necessary, but not sufficient. During an actual disaster, you’ll also need someone to spin up the servers and networking and storage equipment to perform the actual recovery too, so it’s preferable to have those co-located with your data.

On top of that, you’ll also need recovery runbooks with the right processes, and the right people with the right expertise to recover your applications. So, the ideal cloud-based recovery service provider should also give you the option of leveraging their expertise to help plan and execute your recovery operations. And since DR test planning and execution take up much IT staff time and budget, it would also be smart to look for a vendor whose staff can take over that function as well. I’m not saying you HAVE to take advantage of this added service…just that it would be nice for you to have the added flexibility and the option to do so.

What are YOUR thoughts on using the cloud for disaster recovery? Are their factors to consider that I haven’t mentioned? I look forward to your comments below.

Download a copy of the Forrester Research Report, titled “An Infrastructure and Operations Pro’s Guide to Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Services.” 

The post Thinking About #DR to the #Cloud? Vendor Selection is Critical. appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Interest in cloud services is growing rapidly. Companies want to leverage these services to address the needs for increased scalability and flexibility, driven by the demands of the organizations’ business units.

One recent survey (among the many that are appearing almost weekly) found that 92 percent of CIOs and IT executives surveyed believe the adoption of cloud technologies is good for business.

However, to fully realize the potential benefits of using cloud services, companies need to develop a thorough cloud strategy to ensure the right services are selected, the migration goes smoothly, and problems are avoided.

Where do you start?
Most discussions about using cloud services begin with an examination of the business justifications for making the move to the cloud. As you might expect, the business issues center on the same common themes that have challenged IT in the past. The only difference now is that cloud services represent yet another choice to consider.

For example, IT budgets have been tight for years and companies have constantly looked for ways to reduce costs. You need to ask yourself: Is this an area where cloud services could help? In some cases, the answer is yes. A cloud service for recovery test and development workloads might offer costs savings through the provider’s use of automation and proven best practices versus a do-it-yourself approach.

Similarly, IT departments have had a persistent problem allocating resources to new projects. Here again, you need to evaluate whether a cloud service might help. In many cases, moving to acloud service will let you offload common tasks such as server administration or providing backup and recovery services to your business units. By offloading this work to a cloud provider, you can quickly scale, while reducing the burden on your staff so they can work on projects that are designed to improve or grow the business.

Other common business drivers to use cloud services include the need to:

• Quickly refresh infrastructure, upgrading to more powerful servers to run today’s more demanding applications without the Cap-Ex impact
• Flexibly scale capacity to meet peak workloads and to support new business opportunities
• Manage and secure the growing volumes of data, which are increasingly subject to regulatory demands on availability, privacy, and protection

Assessing your cloud readiness
Once a business justification for moving to cloud services is established, the next step of a cloud strategy is to assess what operations and which applications should be moved.

Are budget constraints limiting your ability to meet IT service delivery needs? If so, you might look for a provider with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. With IaaS, the provider is responsible for managing servers and other IT equipment. Using an IaaS cloud service also means that the provider incurs the cost of data center space, electricity for running and cooling IT equipment and the management costs to ensure the IT equipment is managed and maintained properly.

Does your IT infrastructure need to be upgraded to support new technologies (virtualization, for example) and new versions of common server-based business applications? Again, an IaaS cloud service might be the right choice. A provider should offer access to the newest server hardware on the market today. You can take advantage of this hardware by running the applications either natively or as virtual instances on this new equipment.

Do your applications have high availability and uptime requirements? Production applications have little tolerance for downtime. When evaluating a cloud service provider, check to be sure its application and infrastructure service level agreements (SLAs) match the characteristics of the production applications that will use the service. For applications that can accommodate some risk and downtime, see if a provider offers a choice in availability options based on the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

Does your IT infrastructure need to handle occasional increased workloads or will it need to scale up to seize new business opportunities? A suitable cloud service could help in a few ways. While old hosting solutions let you add capacity, they take time to implement and frequently lock you into long-term contracts. Most cloud services offer a pay-as-you-go approach that gives you the flexibility to not just scale up to meet those peak workload times, but you can also cut back when things return to normal. Additionally, when needing to bring more capacity online quickly for a new business opportunity, most cloud services offer an easy way for you to request and provision resources.

Does your organization need to free up IT staff to work on new projects? A suitable cloud service could offload the day-to-day tasks such as server management, backup and recovery, security and data protection, and recovery planning to the provider. This would free up your IT staff so they can work on the new projects.

Are there regulatory issues (security, availability, etc.) that you must address? If so, a suitable cloud service provider might be able to help you meet compliance regulations such as PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act).

Take the next step
Working through such a cloud readiness assessment will bring you to the last step in the development of your cloud strategy: selecting a suitable provider.

In particular, after running through this readiness assessment exercise, you should know if a cloud service is right for you. And you should have some idea of the capabilities you will need from a cloud provider.

Given that every company has its own business, financial, staffing, and IT resources issues, no one choice is right for everyone. You will need a provider that can meet your company’s specific requirements. This is an area where SunGard can help.

SunGard offers consulting services that can help you with your readiness assessment. And once that assessment is completed, SunGard offers an array of managed cloud services to meet any company’s needs.

For more information about SunGard Cloud Services, visit: http://www.sungardas.com/Solutions/Cloud/Overview/Pages/CloudOverview.aspx

The post How to Choose the Right #Cloud Strategy for Your Organization appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

My husband’s visitor badge to the World Trade Center that permitted him to stay through 9/27/01. (I whited out his name to protect his privacy). It’s a daily reminder of how lucky we are.

It is 6:05am on September 11, 2001. I am sitting on an airplane at the San Jose airport, waiting to fly to San Diego to give a speech. Our departure time is 6:25am, so I am quickly reviewing speaker’s notes on my laptop when the pilot comes on the intercom and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, you may or may not have heard that a jet liner crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center this morning. And now, another one has crashed into the South Tower. We are now sure this was an act of terrorism, and will not be pushing back from the gate just yet. Sit tight, I’ll be back with an update again soon.”

I feel shock and horror, and a sudden stab of worry about my boyfriend. He had just accepted a new job with Morgan Stanley, and had flown to New York City for new hire training that started September 10. I don’t know for sure whether he is in the World Trade Center, but every hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

Oh no, I think, I bet he IS in there. I grab my cellphone to call him, and see that I’ve missed several calls, all from his family in Chicago. They have left me six increasingly frantic messages on my phone asking me if I know exactly where his training was being held.  I call my boyfriend’s phone and get sent straight to voicemail. I try again. Voicemail again. So I dial his boss at Morgan Stanley, Mr. C., who answers immediately.

I lie to him and tell him I’m his employee’s fiancée. It isn’t entirely a lie…my boyfriend had proposed to me, but I just had not accepted (I am waiting for the NASDAQ to come back from the depths of the abyss so that our stock portfolios can “heal” and actually finance a wedding). Mr. C confirms that my boyfriend is, indeed, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, on the 61^st floor. I ask if he knows whether the Morgan Stanley employees are safe. He tells me that no one has been able to get through. He does not know anything.

Now I am panicking. In fact, I am hysterical. I hang up on Mr. C and call my boyfriend again, and this time, when I get his voicemail greeting, I burst into tears. I get so hysterical, in fact, that the flight attendants ask me to de-plane. I drive home and turn on the TV, and the first thing I see is footage of both towers falling. I hear Peter Jennings say, “These towers peeled like bananas. It’s hard to see how anyone in them could have survived.” I fall to my knees in horror. I say out loud, “He is dead.”

Alone in the small apartment that we share, I wail and throw things around. I curse myself for not marrying him when I could have. For letting money be a reason to delay happiness, for having a fight with him on the phone the previous night, for letting him fly to New York at all.  For not living by Suze Orman’s fundamental tenet, “People first. Then money. Then things.”

Today is also September 11. With the passage of so many years, it is somewhat less painful to examine the events of that day and try to draw lessons from it. Amazingly, there really are no new lessons – we knew then, as we know now, that people come first. People are irreplaceable. I’ve just told you why from a personal perspective, but from a professional perspective, this is true as well.

My company, SunGard AS, is a leader in business continuity and disaster recovery, and I’m so glad that they recognize that people are at the center of business, and therefore, should be at the center of business continuity planning. Why this is not immediately obvious to other companies – even companies in the business of DR – boggles my mind. What’s the point of recovering your data and applications, if there are no people around to use them? Who is going to recover your data and applications in the first place? And exactly what makes companies think that their people will leave their families and loved ones in the event of a true disaster – like 9/11 – to go to a far-off recovery site and recover their data and applications? We’ve already learned – and from 9/11, no less – that they won’t.

Which is why SunGard has custom-designed mobile recovery units that can show up at your location, and an innovative new partnership with Nav Canada that allows employees to bring their families with them to live in recovery facilities designed like a resort hotel, giving them peace of mind and freeing them to perform recovery functions.  At the end of September, we’ll announce another of our exciting partnerships coming down the pike that will create even more holistic solutions for true business resiliency – but I don’t want to let any cats out of any bags yet. Suffice it to say, we are thinking of and planning for everything – and we’re not forgetting the most important thing: PEOPLE.

As for my own 9/11 story, it has a happy ending (unlike so many others). My man survived completely unharmed. The worst he suffered were scuff marks on his Brooks Brothers shoes, in which he ran down 61 flights of stairs, and then from the fallen Towers all the way up to Alphabet City, where he was staying.

Oh, and yes, I married him. We just celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary 4 months ago.

The post My 9/11 Story: People Are at the Center of Life. And Business. And Therefore, #BusinessContinuity Planning. appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

My first VMworld ever is over and I am zombie-tired. The four days of driving to San Francisco’s Moscone Center and back (40 miles each way), plus the constant scramble between the exhibit hall and the education hall, plus the effort to cram all kinds of VMware knowledge into my wee little brain, have me plum tuckered out. But, as depleted as I am, I’m also a lot smarter from the experience.

I attended sessions on how CIOs can run IT like a business, on cloud-aware security, and on running mission-critical applications in the cloud. But I think the most valuable session for me was one I hadn’t planned on attending. Yup, on my first day there, I was just wandering around, trying to get my bearings, when I happened upon a session titled, quite simply, “Disaster Recovery.” So I trusted to serendipity, stumbled in, plunked down in an open seat, and started listening.

It was a discussion group wherein the leader, VMware’s Ken Werneburg, asked a series of questions to which the participants could respond by hitting a letter on a hand-held remote device. As we responded, our answers were aggregated in real-time and flashed up on the screen in front. Here are some of the nuggets I got out of that session:

• 81% of the people in the room (about 50 people) operate a production environment that is 51-10% virtualized.
• Only 6% had ever gone through a full failover, while 18% have had to fail over a portion of their environment, 30% have tested DR but never gone through a true DR scenario, another 30% had never had to do any DR whatsoever (including testing), while the remaining 16% had an outage and could not recover at all.
• 55% of the people in the room have not looked at DR in the cloud, but think it sounds intriguing. 15% had looked at it but written it off, 10% think it’s fantastic, and the remaining 20% are not interested at all.
• 50% of the people in the room want to test DR twice a year, while 30% wanted to test quarterly. The remaining 20% felt that once a year was more than enough.
• 40% of the people in the room had performed a Business Impact Analysis and arrived at a cost per hour of downtime; 43% did not have the time, money, or people to do this, and the remaining 17% had never even heard of it.

As for SunGard’s participation in VMworld sessions, our VP of Recovery Services Product Management, Michael de la Torre, co-presented a session with VMware called, “DR to the Cloud: A Service Provider’s Perspective.” The room was packed as Michael highlighted the six factors that affect the design of your company’s DR plan (RTO/RPO, size of environment, complexity, performance, regulations, and program management). In particular, Michael also talked about the difficulty of recovering a hybrid physical and virtual environment on a do-it-yourself basis, an issue that no one is really thinking about and that we at SunGard have brought to the forefront of late. (Check out our videos below that explain the primary challenges of recovering complex hybrid environments).

Because no one has really talked about these challenges before – and THAT’s because the industry has not really thought about what happens when you go to recover production environments that are increasingly heterogeneous mixes of applications, platforms, databases, hypervisors, and storage – it has felt a little like we’ve been pointing out that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Especially since the prevailing wisdom is, “Virtualization makes disaster recovery ridiculously easy.” So I felt particularly validated when someone asked the question of VMware, “Will you be releasing any products that also address the recovery of physical servers?” To which the response was, effectively, “No…just get as virtualized as possible so you don’t have to deal with that.” Hmm. I’m not sure we’re ever going to get to a 100% virtualized world, quite honestly, and until then, virtualization will continue to bring another layer of complexity to the recovery problem.

In the meantime, I’ll look forward to hearing your comments on what you learned at VMworld, and to attending again next year.

The post #VMworld Recap: Lessons Learned and Insights Gleaned by a VMworld Rookie appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

By Ram Shanmugam, Sr. Director of Product Management

Part 1 of this blog series described the things that change and don’t change when recovering hybrid environments (part physical, part virtual). Part 2 of this series talked about application tiering and data movement, two things that don’t change even when the environment is hybrid. In today’s Part 3, I’m going to get on my soapbox about the three main challenges of recovering hybrid environments.

The 3 Challenges are:

1. The need to recreate a multi-layer, multi-platform hybrid stack for each and every mission-critical application.
2. The need to do point #1 above within a certain recovery time objective (RTO).
3. The need to spend the capex for a second site (both hardware and software), and the opex to maintain it.

Let’s take a typical example of a 3-tier web application, say, an e-commerce application. The application may have a database layer that is on two different systems: a Linux system running Oracle and a Windows server running SQL. Next, examine the middleware, or business logic, layer of that application with it on a Win2K server running WebLogic, and its job is to aggregate data from the Oracle and SQL servers. And finally, the web layer is on an ESX server running Apache.  To make things more complicated in this scenario (and therefore realistic), the web and middleware tiers are stored on an EMC SAN device, the Oracle database is on a NetApp SAN device, and the SQL server is on yet another storage vendor’s device (say, a Dell device).

In this scenario, you have multiple storage platforms, multiple compute platforms, multiple operating systems, and a mix of physical and virtual environments. Sound familiar? Now, let’s say something goes wrong, and you need to recover this application at your recovery site. News flash: your recovery is going to fail if you haven’t created the identical physical and virtual stacks in your recovery environment to accommodate all three layers. If you have the wrong version of VMware’s hypervisor running in the recovery environment, you’re dead in the water. If you have the wrong hypervisor running in the recovery environment (say, Xen), you’re dead in the water. If you have only the ability to recover the database layer by itself, or both the database and middleware layers without the web layer, you’re dead in the water. Or vice versa – getting the web layer back without the other two layers also leaves you up a creek.

And that’s just ONE app. What if you have 50, 80, or 100+ apps to recover? Now, compound this problem with the problem of having to recover all of these apps within a certain RTO, and you’re starting to get the picture of the magnitude of the challenges presented by hybrid environments. In a word: elephantine.

In order to support the recovery of a hybrid environment, you need to have the correct infrastructure in place: the right recovery technologies for each platform and O/S in your secondary site, the right expertise or staff (an Oracle person, a Windows person, a storage person, a VMware person), and a well-documented disaster recovery blueprint (or runbook) that contains all of your recovery processes.

Moreover, in order to have that runbook be current, you need to make sure that any changes in production configurations make their way into the recovery environment (change management). And putting all of this in place could cost a big bundle.

Do these challenges sound familiar to you? If so, how are you addressing them today? I’d love to hear your feedback, as well as any insights into what you’re doing to keep your hybrid environments available.

We’ve just published a white paper containing a more fleshed-out version of SunGard’s suggested approach to recovering complex hybrid IT environments, if you’d like additional information.

The post Part 3: #Virtualization Makes #DR Easier, Except When it Makes it Harder appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

So let’s talk about application tiering first. Virtualization does not change the need to perform a business impact analysis that helps you understand the cost of downtime application by application. At the end of this process, you should have a list of applications prioritized by the size of their impact to revenue or to costs (some applications, if down for too long, can actually start incurring penalties for your company). Following best practices, you would then assign a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) to each of these applications. So far so good, right?

Next, you need to move your data over to your secondary site via a “data mover.” Data movers, as we like to call them here at SunGard, are pretty much exactly what they sound like: the technology for moving data from one site to another. The slowest form of data movement, of course, is to put all your data on tapes and send them on trucks over to your secondary site for vaulting. However, for applications that require faster recovery, a number of technologies and choices are better.

At SunGard, we recommend selecting the data mover based upon the RPO of the data you are moving. Our reasoning behind this is that data movers vary in cost, so you would want to match technology to the data being moved, based on the value of the information.

If you’ve done the Business Impact Analysis that I mentioned above, you’ll have assigned the data supporting your applications to one of 4 tiers of RTO:

• Tier 1: < 4 hours RTO
• Tier 2: 4 – 12 hours RTO
• Tier 3: 12 – 24 hours RTO
• Tier 4: 24+ hours RTO

Now, you have 4 broad categories of data mover to select from:

• Server- or host-based replication: This uses asynchronous server replication technology to deliver recovery at sub-4 hour RTOs.
• SAN-based replication: This is where you use the storage replication technology of your choice to replicate data from production to recovery environment, with the aim of recovering large-scale virtual applications environments at sub-12 hour recovery points.
• SAN-based vaulting or snapshot: Your primary site data goes into an online vault. Typical recovery point objectives are within 24 hours.
• Online or disk-based backup: The application data is backed up using backup software onto a disk (or even a tape). The RTO is 12-48 hours, with the RPO depending upon backup frequency and windows.

As you can see, the choices above increase in RTO and RPO tiers. In other words, for Tier 1 data, it’s best to use server- or host-based replication as your data mover. For Tier 2 data, it’s best to use SAN-based replication. And so on and so forth.  This way, you are aligning your data movement technology with the business value of your data.

But as I’ll discuss in my next post, simply replicating your data at a second site does not buy you a disaster recovery plan! Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the key challenges in recovering applications running in a hybrid environment.

Read on, Part 3: Virtualization Makes DR Easier, Except When It Makes It Harder

The post Part 2: #Virtualization Makes #DR Easier, Except When It Makes It Harder appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

SunGard’s team will be meeting customers and partners at booth #2322 to discuss SunGard solutions, such as recovering hybrid environments, and sitting in on a number of breakout sessions across many VMworld tracks. Read what our experts have to say about the technologies that are capturing their attention, and what they’re looking forward to most.

And with so much to learn from both the business and the technology perspectives, the dizzying array of VMworld options can be a lot to process. But have no fear: SunGard’s experts also offer their tips on how to extract the most value from your time at VMworld.

Janel Ryan, Director, Product Marketing, Managed Services (@janel_ryan)

The main reason I look forward to attending VMworld is to expand my knowledge about trends, technologies and competitors. VMworld 2012 can give attendees a good sense of what’s happening in the industry from the variety of breakout sessions. Breakouts provide valuable insight into the latest technology and tools and the interaction with peers and customers provides a view into what businesses are looking for.

I’ll be attending sessions which focus on technology use cases, as well as those I believe can give me more insight into technology adoption.

I’m looking forward to talking to attendees about SunGard Cloud Services.  We have such a great solution set for enterprise customers whether they are looking to address primary or recovery environments.

My best tips for attendees are to go to the keynotes, and plan your days, but don’t overfill them with sessions.  You need to keep time in between to talk to peers, analysts, customers, and others to hear what they are thinking.  It is best to arrange meetings in advance since the show gets so busy.

Ron LaPedis, Workforce Continuity Specialist (@SunGard_RonL)

At this year’s VMworld, there are many sessions on not only backing up your data and servers to the cloud, but also on keeping your primary and backup data secure. It can seem like a simple question – “Do YOU know if your backup systems and data are secure?” – but there are times when the answer is unclear.

It’s important to talk to customers about how to integrate. VMware and NetApp, VMWare and EMC… servers and storage go together like peanut butter and jelly. The message we want to send is, unless you have an integrated system which backs up both in sync, you might get stuck when trying to recover.

What intrigues me about VMworld 2012 is there seems to be a lot more sessions on private cloud this year. That leads me to wonder whether enterprises have been scared away from the public cloud by some of the recent outages and security breaches that have made news.

Afshin Shams, Enterprise Cloud Specialist (@ashams99)

VMworld is a great chance to connect with peers and users of virtualization technology to understand what’s happening in the industry from an adoption and needs perspective.

By meeting with other providers, you get a sense of what their offerings are in the marketplace and how they are leveraging virtualization to respond to the needs of the customers. Conversely, by speaking with users and customers, it helps me understand what is most critical for them in the way they are using virtualization, why they need the technology, and what they are seeking from virtualization in the near future. Lastly, listening to VMware’s executives talk about the future direction of the technology and the company helps us understand their views of customer needs.

I’m also excited to talk about SunGard’s cloud offering for both production and recovery purposes. This is most relevant to the users and attendees at the show and I hope to engage with them about our cloud offering. I want to talk about how SunGard leverages the #1 virtualization platform to deliver its Cloud Services.

The best tip I can provide to other attendees is definitely to plan your days in terms of sessions, and leave room to meet with customers and prospects that you know are attending. Keep the meetings interactive and embrace the energy and vibe of this exciting event—and arrange meetings in advance as there are many other vendors trying to do the exact same thing.  There’s no more exciting and electric place to talk to about our cloud services than at a show where everyone has the same interests –virtualization, where is it now, how customers can do more with it, and where is it going.

JP Blaho, Director of Product Marketing (@BlahoJP)

For me, VMworld is really about checking out different companies with different approaches to business.  I look forward to exploring the trade floor to discover new ideas and technologies.  It is the spirit of innovation that gets me excited about this event.

This is my first VMworld conference, so I plan to attend a variety of sessions.  My background is around network security and storage, and I do plan to attend a couple sessions that talk about these markets. I think that attending some of the seminars, and listening to other vendors present helps validate my approach to technology.  It also helps, early on, to identify business opportunities so that we can explore features and functionality to enhance our own service offering roadmaps.

I’m most excited to talk to people at the show about SunGard’s Security-as-a-Service (SaaS).  Security is oftentimes perceived as an unwanted necessity.  I think with some of the new cloud-hosted services coming out, like Log & Threat Management, security becomes less of a bottleneck in the network, thus becoming a significant advantage over traditional network security solutions.

Since this is my first VMworld, I am going to follow the same personal rules I have for conferences like RSA and Interop.  Plan your sessions first.  Map out the vendors you want to visit in the Expo Hall, and probably most important, remember to set my “Out of Office” message on my email.  That way, I can focus on all things VMworld for a few days.

Derek Siler, Senior Product Manager, Recovery Services (@PhillyTechPM)

I’m attending VMworld to learn about our clients’ recovery requirements for their virtualized environments. I’m also interesting in discovering how clients are evaluating releasing VM production and DR workloads to the cloud.

The event also offers a great opportunity to speak with IT decision makers on how they are addressing production and recovery requirements on their virtualized environments.

I’ll be attending several sessions for application virtualization for customer’s ERP apps. As far as SunGard’s presence at booth #2322, I’m most excited to share with customers our Recover2Cloud for Site Recovery Manager (R2C-SRM) and how we can protect their production VMs economically and resiliently.

My recommendation for VMworld attendees: network, plan in advance, and don’t overbook yourself!

The post @SunGardAS Experts Give Sneak Peek Into Their #VMworld Plans appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

In less than a week we’ll be hopping a plane from our corporate headquarters in Philly, and heading to “The City by the Bay” for VMworld 2012 at the Moscone Convention Center, August 26-30.  This year we will be a Bronze Sponsor and will be holding down the fort in booth #2322.

During the expo, stop by our booth to meet with our cloud specialists and learn more about: A Cloud So Solid, our flexible, secure, cloud computing offerings for production hosting and recovery as well as our unmatched consulting services. Follow and tag your tweets with #ACloudSoSolid for the latest details and to get the play-by-play from the show floor.

We have a number of exciting things happening this year at VMworld that you can’t miss out on.  From white boarding sessions in our booth where you’ll get to roll up your sleeves and dig deep into several topics with our experts, to a Twitter contest where you’ll have a chance to win one of many prizes and lastly a VMworld panel session where we’ll be discussing DR to the Cloud with VMware’s Gil Haberman and SunGard’s Michael de la Torre.

Here are all the details you need to know when putting together your VMworld “must do” list:

Roll-up your sleeves at one of our white boarding sessions: (All sessions take place in our booth, #2322)

Breaking through Barriers to Cloud – Tuesday, August 28, 12:15pm; Wednesday, August 29, 12:15pm

• With all the mystique surrounding Cloud, it’s hard to believe this new IT delivery model was built using existing infrastructure elements that have been around for years. What’s truly exciting about Cloud services however, are how these elements are fused together in ways that allows us to re-imagine what an IT operation can be.  And with any disruptive event, there are benefits as well as challenges. Learn about the real and perceived barriers to the cloud in this session.

Delivering Security-as-a-Service (in partnership with Alert Logic) – Wednesday, August 29, 3:45pm 

•  With the adoption rate of Software-as-a-Service growing, and the increased demand of Managed Security Services, a new solution category has been created: Security-as-a-Service.  Although considered a barrier to cloud adoption, security can also help accelerate an organization’s evolution into the cloud.  In fact, companies that deploy security-as-a-service in their environment have realized a reduction in security breaches and network attacks. In this session, learn how organizations are restructuring their security posture to take advantage of the Cloud.

The Three Challenges of Recovering Hybrid Environments – Monday, August 27, 3:15pm; Tuesday, August 28, 3:15pm

• Although virtualization does make disaster recovery easier, the world is still not 100% virtualized. As long as there are still critical business applications running on hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures, the recovery of these applications is actually harder, not easier. If you have a complex physical environment running multiple applications on multiple platforms, operating systems, storage, and hypervisors, and have not made proper preparations in your recovery environment, then it could throw a significant “monkey wrench” into your recovery success.

How Solid is Your Cloud? (in partnership with Cisco) – Monday, August 27,12:15pm

• A lot has been written about the different types of clouds.  What hasn’t been delved into as deeply is cloud infrastructure and the importance of availability.  Users need to access data around the clock and the systems that deliver that data need to be protected from outages and interruption.  This live white boarding session will provide an overview on the importance of a secure and recoverable infrastructure and discuss the role of unified switching within a vblock infrastructure

Hear the latest on “DR to the Cloud” in this panel discussion with VMware:

DR to the Cloud – Service Provider Perspective”with Michael de la Torre, SunGard Availability Services and Gil Haberman,
VMware, Inc.  – Tuesday, August  28, 2:00pm

• Many organizations today do not have adequate disaster recovery protection for their applications. In most cases, disaster recovery is perceived as too expensive and complex. DR is a natural fit for the cloud, and VMware’s Disaster Recovery to the Cloud Services make disaster recovery broadly accessible for all applications and sites by providing simple, cost-efficient and automated disaster protection using SRM 5 and vSphere Replication. In this session, VMware and SunGard will present new services that are delivered using vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication. We will also discuss the future evolution of these services.  Get more details on this panel discussion here.

Stay Connected with Us and Win a Prize! Follow Us to Participate in Our Twitter Contest:

It’s simple: Take a photo of yourself at the @SunGardAS booth and tweet the photo with “@SunGardAS” before and “#ACloudSoSolid #VMworld” after your photo link. You will automatically be entered to win an Apple iPad3!

Don’t have a camera handy? You can still win a Starbucks or Visa gift card! Follow @SunGardAS on Twitter and answer a question during our #ACloudSoSolid Twitter contest. Answer a question correctly, be sure to tag your answer with #ACloudSoSolid and you could win!

Both contests will take place August 27th – 29th at VMworld, so make sure you follow along and don’t miss out.

Follow us for more details and learn what you can win!   (Twitter Contest Official Rules)

Looking forward to to this year’s VMworld! See you there.  Follow us on our other social channels during the show for live updates –Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

The post @SunGardAS Exhibits #ACloudSoSolid at #VMworld 2012 appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last half-decade, you know that virtualization is changing the landscape of IT and data centers.  In terms of financial impact, virtualization untethers applications from physical servers, creating valuable savings. In terms of disaster recovery impact, virtualization makes recovering applications easier – MUCH easier. It’s as easy as copying a file to a computer and running it.  Here’s the kicker: the world is not 100% virtualized yet. Data centers are becoming increasingly virtualized, but most data centers today are still some part physical and some part virtual. That is to say, they are “hybrid” environments (to support my point, Gartner told us in a recent inquiry that they estimate 50% of all workloads today to be running on virtual machines).[1] That means, 50% are not.

While newer applications are being run on exclusively virtual workloads, there are still plenty of mission-critical apps running on a combination of mainframes, Windows servers, Linux/Unix systems, and virtual machines. Given this scenario of a hybrid production environment, the challenge for CIOs becomes: “How do you best protect and recover applications within a hybrid infrastructure within certain recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)?” Or, in other words, “How do you think about Disaster Recovery in this new semi-virtualized world?”

Well, here’s my short answer: as long as we are living in this hybrid world, virtualization is an added layer of complexity that requires some adjustments to your recovery strategy and infrastructure. Most DR fundamental principles don’t change, but a few tweaks are required. I will elaborate upon these in this blog and in two more blog posts to come.

What Doesn’t Change

1. Application tiering. Applications still need to be tiered according to their respective cost of downtime. You should still assign an RTO and RPO to each application based on its overall impact to your business.
2. You still need to move your data from your production environment into a recovery environment (some might call this a “DR site” or “secondary site.”) How you choose to move the data is dependent upon the RTO and RPO that you assigned above.
3. You still need to ensure compatibility between production and recovery environments. After all, if you let the infrastructures and technologies between the two sites diverge too much, how can you use one to recover the other?

What Needs Tweaking

Since your primary site is now a hodgepodge of physical and virtual (meaning multiple applications running on multiple platforms, multiple hypervisors, and multiple storage), you should expect that your recovery site will be the same as well. If you’re doing DR yourself (we call this the “self-insured” model), then you’ll need to ensure the total compatibility of your physical and virtual compute layers between your primary and secondary sites. The “tweak” I am referring to is the addition of the “virtual” layer, with all of its attendant hardware, software, and people/expertise.

I’ll be back later this week to spell out more about each point above. Stay tuned!

Read on, Part 2: Virtualization Makes DR Easier, Except When It Makes It Harder

The post #Virtualization Makes #DR Easier, Except When it Makes it Harder appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

The increased availability of powerful ultrabooks, smartphones, and tablets is blurring work and home life for many users. And most users don’t want to maintain two sets of contacts, calendars, and files, or lug around two devices when one would do.

Many companies are adopting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach where workers can use their own devices to access company resources such as email, files, applications, and databases.

To put the BYOD movement into perspective, consider that a recent industry study found that 44 percent of firms had a BYOD policy in place in early 2012, and that number increased to 94 percent in 2013. There are several reasons for this rapid embracement of BYOD. Workers get an improved user experience, and the flexibility of being able to use one device for personal and work chores helps make workers more productive since they can conduct business anywhere at any time. In turn, this increased worker productivity helps companies gain a competitive advantage.

However, as BYOD becomes more commonplace, companies must address new security challenges. A significant problem is that IT loses control of a device’s configuration and its security settings, which can leave a device and the corporate network open to threats. Yet, users will continue to push for access to corporate resources and data using these devices. As a result, companies will continue to struggle with mobile governance, which Gartner defines as the management of the people, policy, and process issues.

3 BYOD Models You Need to Know

BYOD changes the risk environment for companies. Similar to what they have done to support teleworkers and other mobile users, organizations must deal with malicious software that can steal data or give unauthorized users access to company resources and companies must grapple with data privacy, protection, and loss through device theft or failure.

Complicating matters is that the way BYOD users access data has also changed. In fact, organizations often must support three BYOD access methods, all of which have different security and data protection challenges.

One way to provide access is to develop native apps for BYOD workers. There are several security issues to consider with this approach. User authentication and access control are essential because the user will have full access (via the BYOD device) to the data associated with that application. If a device is compromised, this can give hackers unrestricted access to that data. So organizations will need a way to monitor for unusual activity (such as the downloading of entire databases). Additionally, data access via a BYOD native app is stored on the mobile device, thus requiring tools to recover data if it gets deleted or corrupted and a way to wipe the data if a device is lost or stolen.

Some companies avoid full-blown native apps and instead use apps or a BYOD device’s browser to point users to mobile-friendly portals and websites. This lets employees and customers easily access and read information. Here again, user authentication, access control, and monitoring for unusual activity are important.

Alternatively, a company could provide a BYOD user with access to corporate servers and data through virtual desktop technology. An advantage with this approach is that data resides on company servers and is easier to protect. But user identification and authentication processes must be robust since the BYOD user will have broader access to company resources. Threat management, intrusion detection, identity control, and content awareness are essential to ensure data and systems are protected in case a hacker compromises a BYOD device and uses it to gain access to company systems.

SunGard as Your Technology Partner

BYOD raises familiar security threats, but requires new ways to safeguard systems and protect data. While organizations can try to address the BYOD security on their own, the 24×7 nature of BYOD usage, variety of devices and access methods, and increased mobility of BYOD users can easily overwhelm IT departments that are already being asked to do more with fewer resources.

That’s where SunGard can help. SunGard offers a variety of managed security services that help organizations secure their BYOD operations.

To start, organizations can provide BYOD users with secure access to company resources using SunGard Managed Firewall and VPN Services. These services deny access to unauthorized users, give authorized users seamless access to servers and applications, and protect data traveling over the Internet through encryption.

To ensure that only authorized users access company resources, organizations can use SunGard’s Identity and Access Management Service. The service lets an organization configure and manage user access and authorization easily and securely. The service is based on industry-leading authentication and authorization technologies including managed digital certificates, access services, and two-factor authentication. The service also delivers managed content and malicious site filtering, as well as virus detection and malicious code scanning of e-mail, ftp, and web traffic.

Even with these safeguards in place, providing BYOD users with access can open an organization up to risks if hackers compromise the BYOD device or an authorized user goes rogue. This is an area where another SunGard Managed Security Service can help.

SunGard’s Managed Unified Threat Management (UTM), or Managed Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/IPS), Services provides intelligent sensing of malicious activities coming from inside or outside a company network; real-time identification and prevention of actual hostile attacks including DDOS attacks, SQL injections, Trojans, IP spoofing, and advanced persistent threats (APT); and the Managed IDS/IPS Services can be configured to block events before they impact systems or networks.

The threat management and intrusion detection services can be complemented by using SunGard Log and Threat Management Services. Log Management provides on-demand collection, storage, reporting, and analysis of log data for Windows event logs, syslogs and flat files in order to identify suspicious activity. Threat Management provides broad scanning capabilities, including comprehensive analysis for an infrastructure and business-critical applications. The services also assists in compliance with a broad range of regulatory requirements, including SSAE 16 Type II audits and PCI DSS 2.0, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, CoBIT regulations.

All of the SunGard Managed Security Services are based on industry-certified best practices and offer 24×7 protection. The services are run by experienced managed security analysts who are experts in keeping information protected. Many possess the Certified Information Security Systems Professional (CISSP) designation, and they are continually trained in the identification and mitigation of Internet-based security threats.

Additionally, SunGard’s Managed Security Services are vendor-neutral and fully managed. They can be customized to meet an organization’s unique business needs.

Taken together, the SunGard Managed Security Services offer organizations a way to embrace BYOD, while ensuring its systems and data are protected.

The post Be Sure #BYOD Doesn’t Spell Bring Your Own Disaster appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

Will work from home work when you need it most?

Telework is getting more popular every year — based on current trends, with no growth acceleration, regular telecommuters will total 4.9 million by 2016, a 69% increase from the current level but well below other forecasts.[1] In fact, the US government’s Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 mandates that every department head identifies who is eligible, partially for emergency readiness, but also to reduce energy use and increase employee retention.

Teleworking has a few basic requirements:

• A secure place to work
• A secure computing platform
• Sufficient and secure data bandwidth
• Access to appropriate voice services
• Power
• No regulatory requirements for employee monitoring

Stockbrokers generally cannot telework due to monitoring regulations. Similarly, call center employees may need special voice equipment, although Voice over IP (VoIP) soft phones should work with many call center applications.

I am seeing more and more companies implementing telework as a workplace recovery strategy, and can’t help wondering if the planners truly thought through all the implications of their decision. When an incident occurs, it is imperative that your critical employees get back to work no matter why they cannot be in the office. And in most cases, telework will not meet this key objective.

As every business continuity practitioner knows, disasters come in three major sizes; single site, localized, and regional. Single site disasters affect one company or one building, localized disasters may affect one or a handful of city blocks, and regional disasters impact a much larger area. Some examples in the United States might be a fire in your computer room, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina or a pandemic.

As long as your computing infrastructure is running in your data center or your hot site, telework might be a reasonable option in the case of a a single site disaster. Of course, your remote access infrastructure needs to be up, along with internet access through your contracted network provider.

In the case of a localized or regional disaster, telework could be problematic for several reasons. Unlike a traditional hard-wired phone line, there are no government uptime regulations around Internet service providers or local cable and DSL providers. When the power goes out, your landline is required to work for a minimum of 24 hours by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) [2], but the same isn’t true for your cellular, VoIP and data connections – assuming that you have power in your house to charge your cellular device or keep your router powered up.

In a single-site disaster or a pandemic, your voice and data connections most likely will be up and your house or local coffee shop will have power. But with most of the city also stuck at home, bandwidth could be constrained by your neighbors also teleworking, playing games on their XBOX, and streaming dancing cat videos.

Telework might be okay for lower priority job functions that can be jettisoned when a larger incident occurs, but for employees that support mission critical and revenue-producing business processes, you need other options available when telework is not possible.

Commercial workplace recovery solutions may seem more expensive than outfitting your employees to work from home, but unless you have done a business impact analysis, you cannot be certain that the cost isn’t more than offset by the potential losses if your business comes to a halt.

So it may be time to take another look at whether or not commercial workarea recovery should be part of your disaster recovery plan. One phone call can bring SunGard to the table with our broad set of options including shared and dedicated seats at a recovery center, or custom-designed mobile recovery units that come to you. Be safe, and be prepared.

The post What You Didn’t Think About When Implementing a Telework #DR Strategy appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

As companies embrace the fact that every business is a contender on the Internet, and every company is subject to the same types of vulnerabilities and attacks, they must all realize their network security postures must be advanced and robust.  This means that a company of six employees must have network security protections which mirror those of an organization of 6,000 employees.  As cost-prohibitive as it sounds, there are ways that non-enterprise-level businesses can implement a security strategy that is comprehensive and effective in protecting themselves from attack just as successfully as enterprise customers.

One such solution is called Unified Threat Management (UTM).  Essentially a UTM is a single platform architecture shared by multiple security applications such as firewall, intrusion detection/intrusion prevention (IDS/IPS), and URL filtering.  The single most important advantage of adopting a UTM is the lower cost to purchase and manage this solution.  Instead of having to acquire multiple discreet security solutions, you only purchase one (licensing varies based on vendor and security applications needed).  Most UTM vendors also offer a centralized interface, so that you can manage all the different applications, create policies and enforce rules from a single location.  A UTM is not the panacea for network attacks or addressing compliance requirements, but it does combine multiple security applications in a footprint that is affordable and robust enough to build some level of confidence in your network.

Knowing that there are solutions out there to help companies of all sizes remain protected can be a relief, but a certain amount of knowledge around network security is required to ensure that you are maximizing your security posture against your IT investment.  For most mid-market organizations, this level of expertise does not exist and the amount of money needed to hire a security expert is not in the budget.  Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are a preferred alternative in these situations.  MSSPs not only manage the security solutions for you, they also can install, configure, maintain, and update the platform at a price that is well within most budgets.  These offerings are usually offered as a monthly subscription service over a two, three and five year agreement.  Most MSSPs are security certified, and will have intimate knowledge on the security application that they will be managing for you.  Not only do you have this security expert as an extension of your company, but you also have this security support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  And like the cybercriminals, these certified security specialists focus all their time on network security, but instead protect from attacks.

If your organization is looking to improve on its security posture, UTM solutions provide a comprehensive suite of security applications to build a stronger security infrastructure.  If you are constrained due to resources or expertise, a managed service around UTM would provide you with a robust security platform, and the certified security expertise to manage it for you.

Security is not a checkbox for addressing compliance.  Selecting default within the security applications does not provide you with the levels of security needed to protect yourself from the cybercrimes.  It is the combination of strong security applications and expert knowledge on security that protect you and your network.  A Managed UTM offering can help get you to that level of security confidence.

The post Enterprise-level Security at a Small Business Budget appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

When I was a kid growing up in the Southeastern United States, I spent a lot of time in the back of my Mom’s lime-green Dodge station wagon, accompanying her on her many business trips to Miami, Florida. I used to love it when I got asked to go, because a) it meant I could miss school; and b) it meant I could eat as many of those delicious Florida mangoes as I wanted.

I remember driving back with her once during a hurricane – she thought she could “get ahead of it” and get home to Savannah before it got too bad. Well, she was wrong.

The storm seemed to descend from nowhere, and things got so windy, rainy, and gusty that we had to pull over to the side of the road to wait it out. It was actually very scary as she and I sat huddled together in the back seat, witnessing the awesome powers of nature crash through the world around us.

Suddenly, we heard a loud CRACK, followed by the sound of glass breaking. When I turned around to look behind us, I saw that a mango had crashed through our back windshield, creating a giant, gaping hole. I remember being delighted, as it meant I could eat another of my favorite fruits, but my Mom was pretty upset.

Fast forward an unspecified number of years (no chance I’m divulging my age), and now I am working at SunGard Availability Services. When I read this case study on how a series of 2004 hurricanes had forced Florida Hospital to “wake up” and rethink their disaster recovery capabilities, it brought back this memory for me.

While the hurricanes did not force Florida Hospital into a declaration of disaster, it did force them to face the unpleasant truth that they did not have the staff, or the time, or the expertise in place to meet their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs). Which is why one of the largest healthcare providers in the entire state turned to SunGard Availability Services for help. In particular, they are now relying on SunGard’s proven expertise to manage all of the aspects associated with testing and recovering their data in the event of a disaster (our “Managed Recovery Program”).

Now that I’m a Mom, I’m actually somewhat appalled at the risk my mother took with me. While I love the idea of mangoes flying unbidden into my kid’s lap, I would never drive home during a hurricane, with or without her. So I’m glad Florida Hospital looked themselves in the mirror and figured it out; it shows a greatness of vision, I think, as well as the wisdom to take responsibility for their destiny and the willingness to take concrete actions to fortify their future.

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You can’t predict a disaster, but you can decide how prepared you’ll be.  To help our customers keep their systems, business processes and people in operation in the face of the increasing threat presented by hurricane seasons, we’ve developed a free Hurricane Planning Toolkit—available now, for a limited time.  Download the FREE Hurricane Preparedness Toolkit 

The post Disasters Have a Way of Making You “Wake Up” and Rethink Recovery appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

In May 2012, at the Citrix Synergy 2012 general session in San Francisco, Indu Kodukula, EVP products and CTO announced SunGard’s support for CloudStack. Specifically, he announced (1) the addition of committers, (2) the decision to build and deliver a production cloud on CloudStack, and (3) the commitment to ship DR process packs as part of CloudStack (You can view a recording of his presentation here – go to time marker 1:16:00).

Why did we do this? In short, we believe that CloudStack is a great foundation for enterprise-grade cloud computing. We love the fact that it’s an Apache project, not just the Apache license; we love the explicit commitment to be compatible with the AWS APIs, we love the tight project and program management and we love the deliberate focus on addressing enterprise use cases. And the fact that CloudStack supports multiple hypervisors (obviously Xen, but also vSphere 4 and 5) is a really big deal.

During the coming year, we plan to partner with Citrix on some exciting projects, so stay tuned!

The post Citrix Synergy 2012: @SunGardAS Supports @Cloudstack appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

The Internet, over the last two decades, has helped create a different way of interacting, transferring knowledge, and conducting business.  It has helped create a level playing field in which companies of any size, and from anywhere in the world, can compete for a consumer’s business.  This has also introduced a completely new form of risk– network security.

Network security has become one of the fastest growing sectors within IT because of the growing number of cybercriminals.  This black-market has designed a business model where the focus is on breaking into businesses via the Internet.  The intent is mainly to exploit their targets for money: whether it’s through holding a company’s network hostage via a DDoS attack, or stealing company data to sell to someone else.  The level of success achieved by cybercriminals has grown to scale so that it has become a volume business which has been estimated to be in the billions of dollars annually.  This does not bode well for organizations, especially those in the mid-market space.

As taught in Economics 101, economies of scale is good for the business achieving it, and dangerous to those who are not shielded from this success.  Initially cybercriminals were looking for and attacking organizations with large brands, solid reputations, and deep pockets.  Attention was not given to the smaller organizations whose transactions over the Internet were considered low volume.  Now that these cybercriminals have achieved a volume-based business, they are able to scale their attack to many companies of all sizes.  Would you rather sell one product for one hundred dollars or one thousand products for one dollar?  This is where cybercrime has moved.  Instead of hunting for the whales, they are casting large nets into the water.  Instead of attacking and breaching one large company, they are attacking and breaching hundreds if not thousands of organizations – many of whom do not even know the breach has occurred.

The other change is that these attacks are no longer immediate and noticeable.  The level of sophistication inherent in today’s security landscape is so intricate that cybercriminals can lay dormant for weeks or months, or slowly collect bits of data at levels which are hardly detectible.  This does not bode well for any company, but especially for the small and medium-sized organization.  Fortunately, there are many affordable tools and services out there to help SMBs monitor and prevent these attacks.  I will discuss these resources in my next post.

The post Network Security Threats on SMBs: What You Need to Know appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.

During the conference, we met with several customers and partners including Enterprise Rent-a-Car, New York Life Insurance, Xerox, Boeing, University of Chicago, and Cisco. One common theme we witnessed during the event was that Big Data is real, it’s here and it’s being commercialized in a variety of different ways.

On Wednesday of the conference, our friends at Brocade invited us to participate in a discussion with John Furrier and Dave Vellante of theCube.  Michael de la Torre, vice president product management, recovery services at SunGard, sat with the cube to discuss current trends and our position on big data, cloud and disaster recovery.

Check out the video with Michael de la Torre and theCube here:

We also had the opportunity to deliver a presentation at the EMC Select booth the third day of the show.  Derek Siler, senior product manager, SunGard Recovery Services discussed the topic “ ‘Timesharing’ Disaster Recovery –  DR Solutions at Fraction of the Cost”.  In case you missed the presentation, check out the SlideShare deck below.

The post #EMCWorld Wrap Up: Video and Slides appeared first on SunGard Availability Services Blog.