SunGard Availability Services To Open New Workplace Recovery Centre In Borehamwood

Published 16th July 2008

SunGard Availability Services to Open New Workplace Recovery Centre in Borehamwood
Government and Business Offered Increased Flexibility for Business Continuity Planning...

LONDON, 15 July 2008: To offer increased flexibility in business continuity planning, SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, announced that it will open a workplace recovery centre in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire on September 16th. The Borehamwood Recovery Centre, which will provide over 1,800 workplace recovery positions that could potentially benefit thousands of local and London based businesses and government organisations, will be linked to three resilient data centres in the London region that will help firms remain connected to their mission critical information in the event of a disaster.

The opening of the Borehamwood centre increases the total number of shared and dedicated workplace recovery positions for SunGard customers to over 8,600 in the London region, spread across nine strategic locations*. Six of these locations encircle outer London, and are situated along the main commuter routes. Forward thinking customers can now develop recovery models based on a multiple site recovery strategy - recovering in the centre of London to manage the localised incidents, and in outer London to deal with the larger events - allowing managers to pre-select the most appropriate site(s) for their recovery needs based on anticipated incidents and convenience for staff.

Additionally, through maintaining a standardised voice, data, and technology infrastructure across all its recovery centres, SunGard also offers customers the ability to re-locate to alternate sites in the case of multiple invocations. This unique ‘rollback’ capability offers end users increased flexibility, and helps ensure that in the event of a major disaster affecting a number of organisations, customers will be able to get their business up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible. ‘Rollback’ was deployed in supporting such high-profile events as the 7/7 bombings and the Summer 2007 floods

Commenting on the launch of the Borehamwood centre Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe, SunGard Availability Services, said: “The addition of Borehamwood to our recovery centre portfolio will give organisations in and around London the flexibility they need to tailor their business continuity plans to the needs of their organisation and staff. It’s asking a lot of staff to expect essential back-office staff who live in one home county to travel either around or across London to a Recovery Centre, thereby extending their journey time to and from work by many hours at both ends of the working day. Your staff and plans may be able to sustain this inconvenience for a few days but it is not an ideal situation for employees working on lengthy invocations measured in weeks, especially for those employees with caring responsibilities at home such as child care or care for elderly dependents.”

Research conducted in 20053 and 20072 revealed that only 25% and 47% of firms respectively considered their staff’s home location when considering choice of recovery centre. Despite significant improvement in the eighteen months between the surveys, firms still place business needs in direct conflict with employees’ basic emotional needs. “If you look after your people, you are more likely to come out of the other side of a disaster with your business and reputation intact,” observed Mr. Tilley.

As with all of SunGard’s UK recovery facilities, Borehamwood will be linked to the award-winning SunGard National Network (SNN) . SNN interconnects SunGard’s regional recovery facilities via an optical network, ScaleNet, to SunGard’s London recovery locations, effectively creating a UK-wide virtual recovery campus.

* Borehamwood, Crawley, City Recovery Campus, Docklands Recovery Campus, Leatherhead, London Technology Centre, South Bank Recovery Campus (x2), and Theale.