SunGard Availability Services has expanded its Cloud Services to Canada with the launch of its first Canadian-based cloud computing delivery centre. The new cloud centre will offer SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services, a highly-secure, enterprise-ready cloud built for production environments, and Recover2Cloud for Vaulting, a fully managed Recovery-as-a-Service offering for applications running on physical or virtual platforms.

SunGard first launched its Enterprise Cloud Services and Recover2Cloud service in North America in 2011, but this opening marks the first instance of the SunGard Cloud on Canadian soil. The Enterprise Cloud Services in Canada are delivered by SunGard from its Mississauga, Ontario data centre with the resilient, enterprise-class Vblock cloud technology from EMC, VMware and Cisco.

Frontline Focus International, a global provider of customized customer experience solutions for many world renowned corporations, recently implemented SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services in the Canadian Centre.

“When it was time to refresh our production environment, we decided we needed an enterprise cloud solution that would support emerging technologies and provide the scalability to meet our company’s growth projections,” said Adam Fariello, Executive Director, Information Technology at Frontline Focus International Inc. “We chose SunGard as our provider as they understood and were able to meet our specific requirements and challenges. During the migration, SunGard acted as an extension of our IT department; the staff’s depth of resources, technical skills and excellent support has made our move to the cloud successful. Additionally, working with SunGard provided the added value of helping us uncover and mitigate potential risks to our organization.”

SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that delivers security, compute, storage, and networking in one flexible, efficient and fully managed platform. This approach delivers higher efficiency and availability for customer production applications. SunGard provides customers a contractually committed 99.95 percent infrastructure uptime Service Level Agreement.

With SunGard’s Recover2Cloud Vaulting services, SunGard provides online backup and recovery of physical and virtual environments and assumes recovery responsibility on behalf of an organization, with operations staff driving solution deployment and performing 24/7 monitoring, troubleshooting and testing. The recovery service is performed at time of test as well as at disaster outage, and is backed by a contractually committed SLA.

“We’ve been seeing a marked increase in demand for services from our Canadian customers,” said Rob Walters, vice president, product management, SunGard Availability Services. “By adding cloud to our existing colocation, managed hosting and disaster recovery services available in our Canadian data centres, organizations can take a hybrid approach to their cloud deployments. They can now blend physical, virtual and cloud models in their overall production and recovery environments.”

The SunGard Mississauga facility is a world-class data centre which is backed by ITILv3 framework, included in SunGard’s annual SSAE 16 Type II audit report and certified to the ISO 20000-1 standard. SunGard’s cloud computing platform is housed within its premier data centres, and as such is adherent to SunGard’s policies regarding governance, risk and compliance.