press releases

LONDON - 18 May 2010: SunGard Availability Services has recently completed its fourth desktop technology refresh in ten years, deploying 7,400 new PCs across its UK Recovery Centres. This latest investment in SunGard’s Workplace Recovery services demonstrates SunGard’s ongoing commitment to providing its customers the best possible alternative workplace solution following disruption to their normal office environments.

SunGard Named Business Continuity Service Provider of the Year 

SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, has been named Business Continuity Service Provider of the Year for a record 7th time at the annual Business Continuity Awards. SunGard also took home a further two awards; Excellence in Infrastructure Management and Most Innovative Product for its Secure Hosted Dealing/ Dealing Room Recovery offering. These awards recognise SunGard’s continued excellence within the field of continuity, availability and IT Infrastructure as a Service.

Business Continuity Forum 

A pillar for more than 75 years in the Gulf Coast communities it serves, St. Martin Bank & Trust Company has 11 branches located along hurricane prone Interstate 10. In spite of Mother Nature's efforts, and in a challenging financial environment, the bank has not only survived, but thrived - in the past year purchasing the American Bank of Welch and adding five new branches. However, while the institution's singular focus on the region has made it more important to the local community, it has also made it more vulnerable to the storms that repeatedly threaten the area.  

Faced with three major hurricanes since 2006 -- Katrina, Ike and Gustav -- St. Martin Bank & Trust needed a way to ensure its critical services remained operational and its customer data was protected in the face of potential disasters. Similar to many institutions its size, it did not have the resources to maintain and manage a facility in another geographic location, so the company looked to IBM Global Technology Services - Integrated Technology Services to implement a "hot site" in Boulder, Colorado. A customer of IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency services since 1990, IBM assisted St. Martin Bank in analyzing and updating its disaster recovery readiness and continuity strategy to include the new facility and capabilities.

Business Continuity Forum 

Workplace disruptions have for the first time displaced technology failures as the primary risk of interruption to businesses, according to research by business continuity firm SunGard into the number of invocations by clients of its recovery services in 2009.

SunGard reports that its invocations log revealed that calls for it to step in to firms experiencing disruption had risen by 42% from the previous year, and that workplace-related invocations had risen by 150% year on year, compared with an 8% fall in IT disruptions.

HERE in the UK, approaches to business continuity are becoming far more holistic. However, in the North East the association with business continuity and IT is still incredibly strong.

This may go some way to explaining why some businesses in the construction industry have not been able to reap the benefits of investing in an effective business continuity management system (BCMS).

Tender documents from the public sector increasingly ask businesses to offer evidence of a business continuity plan and statements from the coalition Government have suggested that this will only become more prominent.

London, UK: 12th March 2010

SunGard has acquired 365 Hosting Limited, a Dublin, Ireland-based cloud computing and data centre services company which trades as ‘Hosting 365’. The acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed, is not expected to have a material impact on SunGard’s results.

Privately-owned Hosting 365 has built a strong presence in Ireland delivering both data centre managed IT services and, more recently, on-demand computing services within its cloud computing environment.