SunGard Availability Services Partners with Amazon Web Services

SunGard Availability Services, a provider of disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software, announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS).

The partnership will enable the company to deliver bi-directional disaster recovery services between SunGard and AWS, without the need to transport the data over the public Internet. Offered through Amazon's Direct Connect platform, the service will include the company’s highly available cloud backup solutions and will be offered to both Amazon Web Services and SunGard cloud customers during the course of 2012.

“This is a complementary relationship that will have wide-reaching benefits for both organizations and our customers,” said Indu Kodukula, chief technology officer, SunGard Availability Services, in a statement. “Amazon Web Services is a leading global cloud provider. SunGard is a leader in reliability, with over a decade of managed service informed by three decades of being the world's leading DR provider.”

“Working with Amazon Web Services means bringing those two worlds together and providing customers of both organizations a more comprehensive range of cloud-based services,” Kodukula added.

In the initial stage of the partnership, SunGard will utilize AWS Direct Connect, which provides LAN-like connectivity from AWS' east coast data centers to the SunGard Enterprise Cloud.  The service also provides AWS Storage Gateway (News - Alert) that can be used to write customer data bi-directionally between the SunGard Enterprise Cloud and AWS's storage infrastructure. The strategy behind this is to provide an additional layer of protection to customer data.

Through this partnership, SunGard will continue to address the challenges faced by clients while entering cloud platforms. The company will provide a comprehensive array of services including application migration, data security, privacy and application availability.

Additionally, SunGard will deliver services in areas of high availability and hybrid workloads, cloud consulting and recovery/continuity services. The company also announced it will offer a broader set of cloud solutions to customers for both production and test/dev environments.

At the recently concluded 2012 Cloud Connect Conference, SunGard Availability Services showcased its “Always Available” Enterprise Cloud Services. Built on Vblock technology from VMware, Cisco (News - Alert) and EMC, these solutions deliver managed compute, network, storage and security services that support customer production environments.