September 19, 2007—SunGard Availability Services has launched a new version of its Paragon software that expands the information availability planning and management tools organizations can use to help them ensure uninterrupted access to their business data and systems.
According to the company, the new version of Paragon adds tools to keep up with organizational and infrastructure changes so that plans are always current. It leverages SunGard’s intellectual capital generated from writing thousands of business continuity plans and running more than 100,000 tests, according to the company. Paragon provides comprehensive business continuity management and information availability planning and management tools.
The new capabilities advance each SunGard Paragon component. They are:
- Profiles. Profiles provide a “living whiteboard” to profile an organizations infrastructure, environment and interdependencies. The whiteboard can now be printed and stored, in addition to being viewed. This capability enables companies to take a snapshot of an infrastructure area and examine the impact should a disruption occur. For example, an organization could look at how people, business functions, and facilities would be affected if a specific server is disrupted.
- Impacts. Paragon allows organizations to conduct a business impact analysis of a potential disruption and provides the ability to create surveys, which now can feed results directly to any item in an availability plan. For instance, companies could assess and record how potential system disruptions may affect a business process such as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance procedures.
- Plans. Paragon now includes a series of new report templates to help users produce graphical analysis and metrics on program progress and readiness. The reporting capability provides security safeguards to control information access down to the individual person and report levels.
- Situations. This aspect of the software tracks availability plans in real time and allows incident managers to swap individual team members in and out of an incident as shifts change or responsibilities are reassigned. In addition to the existing e-mail messaging, organizations can now use text-to-speech notifications to individuals and teams when assignments are due or completed.
- Notifications. Enables organizations to launch communication directly from any plan or crisis management screen. This area now supports messages delivered via personal voice recordings in addition to automated text-to-speech. The notifications engine embedded in Paragon can be used independently of Paragon screens for communications not directly connected to availability planning and response.
For more information visit SunGard Web site.
