Cyber-criminals are increasingly viewing education institutions as easy prey.
Education establishments don’t have the large budgets of banks and big businesses. This can lead to holes in their cyber security.
There is also no shortage of teachers and pupils who will inadvertently click on a malicious link or open a suspicious attachment, letting cyber-criminals in and wrecking teaching plans as systems and computers stay down for days while a massive security clear-up takes place.
In the event of a ransomware attack, though, Adam now has the reassurance that all Cheam School’s data will be recovered to a state before infection. This has not always been the case. He said: “We were hit about five years ago. That was before my time at the school, but I know recovering that data took a long time and we were not able to recover it all. I was notified recently that three or four prep schools were hit with ransomware, but I now have the confidence to say ‘we don’t need to pay £80,000 to get our data back in the event of a ransomware attack’, we’ll just go back to our backups and crack on.”
RivaNET ensures Cheam School staff have access to what they need when they need it via InstantData™, a unique Redstor technology that prioritises streamed recoveries.
Microsoft’s own Services agreement recommends having a third-party backup provider and Adam said: “The real win with Redstor, is the knowledge that everything is protected. If we get hit by ransomware, we can just switch to a previous version. That gives me massive peace of mind."
Cheam School has found Redstor’s subscription-based pricing model to be simple, cost effective and predictable.
Adam said: “We know our 2TB will grow over time, but we can budget accurately year to year. That's a big thing for our finance department.”
Redstor is designed to have minimal or no human intervention throughout its daily management.
John Sainthouse, IT Services Director for RivaNET, said: “Cheam School’s previous backup system was disjointed and needed a lot of manual intervention and specific knowledge to recover data.
“Because they were moving everything into 365, it was incredibly quick and easy to set up protection with Redstor. In 10 minutes they had all their 365 data protected."
Adam agreed: “Protecting the cloud data was very simple and straightforward. The fact we know we can also protect server infrastructure too is amazing. We knew Redstor was tried and trusted by other schools that we respect so we felt an element of faith in it.
“RivaNET makes life so much easier. Not only do they know what they are doing, they are able to talk to people like me, who come from an education background rather than a tech background.
"When it comes to speaking to school staff, who just want to know a backup will work, having someone like John to bridge that gap is invaluable."