SunGard Availability Services has launched an enterprise-class shared cloud in Europe.

Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice-president Europe for SunGard Availability Services, commented: “In SunGard sponsored research on cloud computing, CIOs revealed their top concerns were around the risk of downtime, loss of control and the security of sensitive data. SunGard’s comprehensive IaaS can help enable organisations to exploit the cloud’s benefits without undue risk, as it is built from the ground up on availability. SunGard’s enterprise-class shared cloud, which balances the utilisation efficiency and affordability of multi-tenanted architecture with the reassurance of exclusive resource at the virtual level, means customers can get the true scalability that the cloud has always promised, but in a secure and resilient environment.”

Most customer IT environments are encumbered by complex infrastructures running demanding applications – such as vital legacy hardware or ultra-low latency trading platforms – which compromise organisations’ ability to provision Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SunGard’s model allows a customer to combine IaaS with a highly evolved managed services offering, helping to ensure uninterrupted access to key systems and data whatever environment they reside. This hybrid approach means applications and data are delivered back to the customer seamlessly and reliably, irrespective of whether the actual applications are running within virtual or physical environments.

With their ‘Flex’ option, customers can rapidly provision additional capacity – including virtual machines and processors, memory and storage – by up to 100% of their existing allocation, allowing them to scale rapidly as needed.

“We want the cost benefits of a shared cloud environment, but if we have to quickly scale up or down, we can’t be restricted from doing so because someone else happens to be using the capacity,” commented James Dunlap, president at Cycle30, the Seattle, US-based cloud billing services provider. “We can’t limit the level of computing power we’ll need to serve our customers at any given time, nor can we compromise on the accessibility and integrity of our customers’ data. The flexibility and the resilience built into SunGard’s cloud infrastructure are hugely reassuring.”

“Whether in a virtual or physical environment, CIOs’ concerns are exactly the same,” commented Steve Wallage, managing director, BroadGroup Consulting. “They absolutely have to know that their data is managed appropriately and that it’s always available when they need it. While required levels of security and availability vary hugely for different organisations, and different applications within each organisation, the constant is that vendors’ enterprise-standard IaaS offerings have to be secure, flexible and resilient.”

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