SunGard Availability Services today announced latest additions to its Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio. A new Managed Workflow feature further enhances the built-in resilience of SunGard’s enterprise-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering by helping customers proactively reduce the risk and exposure associated with making system changes to live cloud environments. SunGard has also added a non-managed virtual machine option that customers can utilize for non-mission critical environments.

Download a Cloud Services brief on the SunGard Enterprise Cloud, authored by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)

Managed Workflow for Reduced Risk to Live Cloud Environments
With Managed Workflow, SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services customers can work within the SunGard cloud portal to modify their infrastructure, such as adding new virtual machines, storage, or changing the firewall policy to address a security vulnerability. A SunGard cloud expert reviews the request – and recommends modifications if needed to help ensure availability – before changes are executed through IT automation, providing a safeguard against avoidable outages while still delivering rapid provisioning of new cloud service.

The SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services portal enables customers to view, manage and request compute resources on demand and review the change review via the portal.

SunGard cloud customers will also have the opportunity to view or manage non-managed virtual machines within their cloud environment. The non-managed offering provides customers an environment for less critical systems, test & 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.

“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.”

“We consistently apply the knowledge we gain from working with our customers to evolve our cloud solutions,” said Rob Walters, vice president, SunGard Availability Services. “Organizations choose SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services because it’s a secure, fully managed, enterprise-ready solution. We incorporated a workflow feature into our portal to ensure the highest levels of performance, availability and security during changes to a critical environment. Many customers also want to leverage our cloud for less critical applications or non-production use cases,” Walters continued. “Our new Pre-Production service provides a more flexible environment with the right services for customers’ test, development and staging needs in support of their production deployments."