SunGard Availability Services Examines Top Business and Operational Advantages Cloud Computing Can Deliver to IT Organizations

WAYNE, Pa., Sept. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Often resource constrained, IT departments in companies and government organizations are immersed in workday responsibilities needed to support the business.  Cloud computing can help take pressure off IT staff while also helping deliver measurable business benefits.  For instance, with cloud computing, organizations can leverage the benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without having to implement and administer it directly.  

"While it took virtualization many years to be widely accepted by businesses, cloud computing is experiencing a much shorter ramp-up period for acceptance," said Satish Hemachandran, director product management of SunGard Availability Services.  "With cloud computing, the battle has already been won, in part, since organizations rely heavily on virtualization.  The business benefits are also much clearer than they were initially with virtualization.  At the end of the day, cloud computing can help businesses save money on day-to-day operations, making it an easy adoption decision for most organizations."

For companies evaluating how and where they can benefit from transferring systems and applications to cloud environments, SunGard has outlined the top advantages that cloud computing can deliver, including:

Core Business Focus.  Prioritizing activities that align with core business needs and drive tangible business value and top-line revenue are top IT concerns.  This focus has driven IT organizations to reassess the costs of procurement and maintenance of infrastructure and non-core applications.  Cloud computing allows companies to better control the capex and opex associated with non-core activities.  As an example, for many basic applications, working with a cloud service provider becomes a simple process that allows businesses to pay only for the computing power or data storage used, with no hidden extras.

Resiliency. One advantage cloud computing offers is it removes single points of failure, enabling a highly resilient computing environment.  The failure of one node of a system in a cloud environment has no impact on overall information availability and does not result in perceivable downtime.  A potential cloud weak point is the network itself.  If the network fails, then cloud services fail.  It is therefore essential for cloud suppliers and private cloud developers to consider network topology and ensure redundancy is built into the entire network.

Scalability.  Cloud computing allows organizations to grow their operations quickly. Provisioning of new IT resources and software applications can be delivered at a pace that does not hold back the rest of the business.  This means businesses do not need to pay for services which are not being utilized, unlike conventional computing where IT resources needed to meet peak requirements must be pre-purchased – and often stand idle outside peak times.

Flexibility and Efficiency.  Cloud computing enables businesses to expand or contract computing power as required and allows "bursts" of computing power to be utilized on an on-demand basis.  While virtualization has enabled organizations to increase the utilization of the server environment, cloud computing takes this a step further by taking over the management of server utilization, reducing "wasted" computing power.  It also allows for effective load balancing.  This flexibility helps ensure that resource-intensive processes don't slow down other business processes and computing services are always operating in a least-cost model.  The result is IT resources are optimized to meet an organization's current needs.

SunGard Availability Services' Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Services provide enterprise-grade managed hosting, including on-demand and virtualized infrastructure with multiple layers of data protection for application availability and recovery.  The SunGard cloud platform is built using the Vblock Infrastructure Package from Cisco, EMC and VMware to help customers reduce capital and operational costs.

About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to 10,000 customers in North America and Europe.  With five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard assists IT organizations across virtually all industry and government sectors to prepare for and recover from emergencies by helping them minimize their computer downtime and optimize their uptime. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organizations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. To learn more, visit www.sungardas.com or call 1-800-468-7483.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies.  SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves 25,000 customers in 70 countries.  SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector.  SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.  With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 380 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. For more information, please visit www.sungard.com.

SOURCE SunGard Availability Services