SunGard Availability Services has introduced its new Managed Workflow service – the latest development of its Enterprise Cloud Service offering. Managed Workflow allows customers to modify all aspects of their cloud environments, as business needs dictate, through a dedicated portal – including infrastructure modifications, the addition of new virtual machines or storage, changes to firewall policy and the support of new business applications - aimed at reducing the risk and exposure associated with making system changes to live cloud environments.

As businesses increasingly rely on their IT resources to help drive efficiencies and bottom-line success, all system upgrades require safeguards against avoidable outages. Managed Workflow combines IT automation with the availability experience of SunGard’s global team of cloud experts: each change request is analysed and any required recommendations to help ensure infrastructure availability or integrity made. Customers can then proceed confident that new cloud services are both rapidly provisioned whilst delivering maximum business value.

“There is a need in certain, non-critical cloud environments, for instant response to change requests in an environment. However, the evaluation of a change request is vital for live production environments, where a system change can create a problem that may take down the entire infrastructure,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Having a global team of skilled, quality engineers reviewing proposed cloud changes brings great value to cloud customers. The approach enables SunGard to apply the knowledge gained from managing its cloud deployments to help ensure any change produces a successful result.”

The Managed Workflow portal also enables customers to view the entire change review and execution, with SunGard committing to a two-hour service level agreement to review every change request to a customer’s production cloud environment. In addition, customers will have the opportunity to view or manage non-managed virtual machines within their cloud environment, providing means for managing less critical systems, testing and development, and non-production applications. Customers can remotely log into these virtual machines and perform a wide variety of administrative tasks such as restarting a VM or applying a patch.

Keith Tilley managing director UK and executive vice-president Europe for SunGard Availability Services comments: “In today’s hugely competitive business landscape, companies expect on-demand access to IT management to deliver the resources they need exactly when they need it. These changes, however, must be thoroughly and professionally reviewed, especially when dealing with live operating environments where failure equates to exposure and the potential for high profile downtime.”

SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services offer managed availability and security of compute, network and storage resources, delivering higher levels of efficiency and availability for customer productions. With the option of managed multi-site recovery, SunGard customers can access a secondary cloud site for recovery – operational within four hours – should the primary cloud site experience an outage. SunGard provides customers with an SLA of 99.9% infrastructure uptime measured by device.

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