New SunGard IT Recovery Centre
SunGard Availability Services, a leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, has today opened its latest Workplace Recovery Centre in Leatherhead, Surrey
Over 3,700* local businesses and Government organisations now have the opportunity to benefit from the 65,000 sq ft state-of-the-art facility, which provides over 1,200 Workplace Recovery positions. Organisations can re-locate staff and systems to the centre in the event they cannot access their buildings or their systems fail. SunGard has committed £16 million worth of investment to the centre over the next ten years, including both capital and operating expenditure.
The opening of the new Workplace Recovery Centre coincides with the imminent launch of the second part of the British Standards Institution's (BSi) new Standard for Business Continuity Management, BS 25999. BS 25999 is the benchmark which businesses are urged to meet in order to ensure they have effective business continuity processes in place. If a business is affected by an outage it needs to ensure it has a plan in place that will enable it to maintain continuous Information Availability and provide its staff with a place to work should access to buildings be restricted. What makes BS 25999 compelling to business is its value as a simple, effective tool to increase the resilience of supply chains, which explains why it has become the fastest ever downloadable Standard; faster than the now ubiquitous ISO 9001 quality management standard.
Keith Tilley, managing director UK & senior vice-president Europe, SunGard Availability Services says: "Events such as the recent floods and the launch of the new BS 25999 Standard for Business Continuity Management have driven issues of business availability and protecting vital information up the priority list for UK companies. Ensuring your staff are well looked after and provided for in the event of a disaster is a crucial part of Information Availability as any business's greatest asset is its people. As such, our new Leatherhead facility is an important addition to our growing national network of recovery centres."
SunGard Availability Services has a network of over 20 standardised high-spec, high-tech recovery centres and over 450 staff dedicated to Information Availability in the UK delivering unrivalled country-wide support to its clients. Most recently SunGard helped customers affected by the floods in July to keep their businesses up and running, by minimising downtime by storing and recovering data that might have otherwise been lost, and providing Workplace Recovery centres for displaced staff. These centres are carefully designed to ensure they provide a comfortable, secure environment from which staff can continue working - even to the extent of providing a much needed shower for those who lost home water supplies in this summer's floods.
Linking Leatherhead to all UK locations is the SunGard National Network (SNN) which interconnects SunGard's regional recovery facilities via optical network, ScaleNet, to SunGard's London recovery locations thereby creating a UK-wide virtual recovery campus.
The campus includes two fully resilient Tier-IV data centres ideal not just for recovery, but for zero downtime requirements. This infrastructure, dedicated to Information Availability, delivers a solution of unrivalled robustness and flexibility for SunGard customers.
* This figure is based on businesses which fall within a 60 minute commute of the Leatherhead centre, from areas including Crawley, Croydon Guildford, Horsham, Kingston, Maidstone, New Maldon, Sutton, Weybridge, and Woking, and do not fall within the boundaries of other SunGard centres.
About SunGard Availability Services www.availability.sungard.com/united+kingdom
