Sungard Availability Services Patents Recovery Execution System to Automate Disaster Recovery for Businesses

WAYNE, Pa., Jan. 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), a leading provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, has developed its Recovery Execution System (RES) to automate disaster recovery processes as part of its Managed Recovery Program (MRP). RES increases efficiency, lowers costs and improves accuracy to improve businesses' resilience. After using RES for more than two years, the company was awarded a patent for the system on December 5, 2017.

Sungard AS's MRP removes the burden and complexity of running an IT recovery program in house. In its place, organizations can take advantage of a complete set of people, processes, tools, and environments to ensure comprehensive, compliant and effective testing and recovery of their data, including workplace recovery.

Sungard AS has used RES in all of its MRP tests since 2015, achieving up to 95 percent automation and driving down recovery times by up to 90 percent for certain platforms. This in turn has led to a test success rate that is 2.5 times higher than the industry average, according to an independent analysis by the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII).

Sungard AS saw an opportunity to cut time and cost from the process by initiating a full-scale, company-wide transformation program to reinvent how disaster recovery is performed. The goal was to make disaster recovery a touch-free process through automation, especially for hybrid environments, promoting greater IT resilience.

Automating disaster recovery methods can shave critical hours off what is typically a labor-intensive process that ties up resources. By eliminating manual tasks, RES helps recover physical servers and hybrid IT environments faster, frees up resources for more strategic work, and virtually eliminates the potential for human error, ensuring mission-critical operations resume as quickly as possible.

RES is an extensible orchestration and automation framework that can be used to programmatically generate an end-to-end execution workflow from the configuration of an entire environment, which, when executed, stands up an environment that's identical to that provided configuration. By leveraging automated discovery, dependency mapping and configuration management technologies, Sungard AS addressed the challenges of automatically documenting an accurate production blueprint and identifying lifecycle changes.

"It truly is the first automation and orchestration of physical, virtual, private and public cloud infrastructure, spanning various technologies that medium to large enterprises have in their IT environments," said Kaushik Ray, Senior Vice President of Global Client Service Management. "Additionally, it provides a fully transparent view of activity within the execution of the event through a user-friendly interface." 

Delivering faster, automated disaster recovery, RES:

• Is technology-platform and recovery-strategy agnostic, which is an industry first
• Delivers a cloud-like experience across any hybrid IT architecture without requiring workloads to move to the cloud
• Reduces infrastructure build-time by an average of 70 percent
• Increases the success rate of DR testing from an industry average of 35 to 90 percent
• Reduces overall Recovery Time Objective (RTO) by an average of 50 to 60 percent
• Significantly reduces service delivery costs

RES has already been recognized in India in 2016 at the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Awards for Continuity and Resilience Innovation. The BCI India Awards recognize the outstanding contribution of business continuity professionals and organizations living in or operating in India or the surrounding countries.

With the latest iteration of RES, MRP customers and recovery management teams have already started benefiting from real-time reports and drill-downs geared toward quickly identifying exceptions, while staying focused on meeting customer Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements. Users are able to quickly gain visibility and act on applications that are at risk of missing RTO and its dependencies, as well as deviations from planned durations on all recovered platforms using progress trends. Sungard AS is currently working on expanding the usage of RES in areas like onboarding Managed Services (MS) customers and for Physical IT Recovery, Physical IT Recovery Plus and certain cloud recovery scenarios.

For his initiation of a company-wide transformation program to reinvent the disaster recovery process through the development of RES, Ray was named a Premier 100 Technology Leader by Computerworld in 2017. This designation recognizes his exceptional technology leadership and innovative approach to business challenges.

About Sungard Availability Services
Sungard Availability Services ("Sungard AS") is a leading provider of critical production and recovery services to global enterprise companies. Sungard AS partners with customers across the globe to understand their business needs and provide production and recovery services tailored to help them achieve their desired business outcomes. Leveraging more than 35 years of experience, Sungard AS designs, builds and runs critical IT services that help customers manage complex IT, adapt quickly and build resiliency and availability. Visit Sungard Availability Services at www.sungardas.com or call 1-800-468-7483. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Sungard Availability Services is a trademark or registered trademark of SunGard Data Systems or its affiliate, used under license. The Sungard Availability Services logo by itself is a trademark or registered trademark of Sungard Availability Services Capital, Inc. or its affiliate. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

The abbreviation for Sungard Availability Services is 'Sungard AS' as cited above. Please use 'Sungard AS' when abbreviating the name rather than 'Sungard' or 'SunGard', which may confuse the reader with another separate company with a similar name. 

For further information, please contact:
Alison Brooker
Sungard Availability Services
Tel: 610-745-2697
[email protected]

SOURCE Sungard Availability Services