SunGard Adds SaaS-Based Business Continuity App

SunGard this week released a Software a Service (SaaS) app designed to let less-technical operations personnel create and track their enterprise and disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

The company, regarded as the leading provider of disaster recovery services for large enterprises, said its new SunGard Assurance app is geared toward those in the lines of business and at branch offices who don't typically deal with ensuring business continuity should a site become unavailable for any number of reasons, such as a major storm, earthquake, fire, flood or some other catastrophic event.

"This solution starts to expand the community of folks involved in planning for disasters," said Derek Bluestone, SunGard's senior director of product management. Bluestone said the new offering is a multitenant cloud app hosted in four datacenters that can be accessed from a Web browser or mobile device.

While central IT in an enterprise may be responsible for restoring the infrastructure, the app lets business unit and application managers create a business continuity plan "from the app up," meaning ensuring its dependencies, such as ERP and CRM systems, are part of the plan.

Later this year, Bluestone said SunGard plans to provide integration between configuration management databases (CMDBs), which auto-discovers all of the devices tied to an application and its configurations, such as ties to constantly changing virtual machines. It will provide that integration using the ServiceNow CMDB, Bluestone said.

"Instead of that being a separate activity, we're going to bring that information and link it to the business continuity plan," he said, "which is all about bringing the HR function back up, or bringing the supply chain back up, and we're going to link those things together into one interface."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/20/2013 at 12:48 PM