These services will provide organizations a cost-effective way to achieve recovery timeframes of less than four hours. And for times when business situations require companies to scale up their operations for short-term requirements, these services provide "capacity-on-demand."

Based on customer objectives for information availability, SunGard continues to utilize advanced technologies such as virtualization and automation to run, restore and recover IT environments.

"Recovery is becoming more complex as business and IT requirements increasingly become more intertwined- while at the same time the availability targets for these systems and applications have never been higher," said David Tapper, program director, Outsourcing, Utility and Offshore Services at IDC. "This new initiative leverages SunGard's core competencies in keeping people, systems and information continuously working together and combines them with virtualization technologies to make recovery processes more agile and help meet increased expectations."

SunGard's virtualization-based infrastructure and services initiative will help to simplify recovery, testing, quality assurance and production applications for enterprises striving for information availability at all times. The initiative builds on SunGard's disaster recovery and AdvancedRecovery capabilities, which provide businesses with options for their risk mitigation; for data monitoring, managing, and protecting; and for rapid hardware provisioning.

"More and more, as companies need to recover faster from IT interruptions or disasters-agility has become a business and IT requirement," said Don Norbeck, director, product development at SunGard Availability Services. "Through this initiative, SunGard is leveraging virtualization and automation technologies- combined with its portfolio of IT and end-user recovery services, high availability solutions and managed services-to help companies reduce recovery times and help mitigate risks quickly and cost-effectively."

SunGard expects initial customer deployments to begin this year.