SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 15 — Cloud Connect — SunGard Availability Services today announced it will provide highly available cloud backup through Amazon's Direct Connect services to both Amazon Web Services and SunGard cloud customers during the course of 2012.

As the first phase of the relationship, SunGard will leverage AWS Direct Connect, providing LAN-like connectivity from AWS' east coast data centers to the SunGard Enterprise Cloud. This arrangement will enable SunGard to provide customers with bi-directional disaster recovery services between SunGard and AWS, without transporting data over the public internet.

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This new service, in technical preview availability, will also allow customers to utilize the AWS Storage Gateway, a software appliance with cloud-based storage using Amazon's Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3),  to asynchronously write customer data bi-directionally between the SunGard Enterprise Cloud and AWS's storage infrastructure, providing customers an added layer of data protection for their data. The service will be architected by SunGard and will utilize both SunGard and AWS technologies.

Additionally, SunGard will continue to address the top barriers to entry of cloud computing, including application migration, data security, privacy and application availability. SunGard will focus on delivering solutions in the areas of high availability and hybrid workloads, cloud consulting and recovery/continuity services.

In addition to cloud-based recovery solutions, SunGard will offer a broader set of cloud solutions on AWS to their customers for both production and test/dev environments, allowing customers to choose from different cloud platforms based on application need.

"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, "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."

For more information on the technical preview, email aws@sungard.com. For more information about SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services, visit www.sungardas.com/cloud.

About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to over 9,000 customers globally.  With approximately five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard Availability Services helps customers improve the resilience of their mission critical systems by designing, implementing and managing cost-effective solutions using people, process and technology to address enterprise IT availability needs. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organizations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. To learn more, visit www . sungardas . com or call 1-800-468-7483. Connect with us on Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook .

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves over 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, visit www.sungard.com.

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Source: SunGard Availability Services