Data centre resilience, availability and security: Successful integration for customer availability
Mark Brown, UK Security Manager, SunGard Availability Services (UK) Limited
Session Synopsis
With 1,600 plus customers – 600 of whom required high-end managed services – the integrity and security of SunGard’s 23 locations is as vital to the operational confidence and physical well being of clients as the rest of SunGard’s award-winning , network of communications and facilities.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when devising a data centre security strategy to meet, not only SunGard’s own exacting standards, but the various requirements of a multi–sector customer base comprising large corporates through to SMEs.
Careful planning is essential, as is finding the right organisation to work with. In keeping with its reputation as an award winning innovator in the industry, most recently demonstrated by attaining CIR’s 2008 Data Centre Strategy of the Year, and 10 years Excellence Awards, SunGard chose to work closely with Honeywell Security Solutions to develop its enhanced integrated security solution to be rolled out during a three year implementation.
Not only have data security issues never been so prominent. From SunGard’s perspective, the right security solution has a direct bearing upon its wider remit to ensure resilience across all data centres to ensure optimum choice and availability for customers.
Not only is a high quality baseline service available for all customers at all UK sites, as a service innovation customers may further determine their adopted security stance. This additional flexibility is available via an integrated security solution designed to meet modern day security and compliance requirements -
In this presentation, Mark Brown, SunGard’s UK Security Manager will consider the key security issues facing high security data centres and how they have been addressed using the latest technologies, including central management of multiple sites and physical and logical systems convergence.
Session date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 2:15pm
Evolving a disaster recovery plan into a business continuity plan
Graham McKay, Brightsolid
Session Synopsis
So you have a disaster recovery plan. It covers how to recover data and IT services in the event of failure of your IT systems, or does it?
Have the plans been tested to ensure that they will actually work in the event of a disruption? Maybe you have undertaken some test restores to ensure validity of the data, or maybe you haven’t. Who decided what information and servers were defined as critical? Do the users of the systems share your priorities for recovery? How useful are your disaster recovery plans if the IT staff are not a round to activate them?
All these questions may be answered in your plans, but the chances are they haven’t. By adopting a business continuity approach to not just IT but the entirety of the business, the answers to these questions will be provided and the focus will be moved from recovery to proactively evaluating threats, minimise risks and focusing recovery on what the business agrees are its mission critical activities.
The obvious key outputs from this process are the business continuity, incident management and business recovery plans. However, extremely valuable information pertaining to the entire organisation will be generated such as business activities/ processes and their associated criticality whether measured in financial, operational or reputational terms.
Graham McKay guides visitors through the process and delivers tips on saving resource, reducing costs,aligning your IT disaster recovery plans with best practice and of course, engaging other users.
Session date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 2:15pm
True Business Continuity for the Virtual Data Centre
Andy Hardy, Managing Director of International Sales, Compellent
Session Synopsis
Automated failover of virtual servers and storage across geographically dispersed locations represents true business continuity for multi-site data centre operators.
This session highlights, with real-world examples, the limitations of traditional disaster recovery (DR) solutions based on conventional storage array failover techniques and identifies the latest approaches using server and storage virtualization can transition a DR strategy into a complete business continuity solution.
Session date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 1:30pm
