With a unique solution that is multi-tenanted and built for the cloud, Focusnetworks are now able to discover, manage, control and protect the data of multiple schools with ease. Running on servers, laptops and workstations, with backup selections profiled from the management console, Redstor provides rapid and granular restore for Office 365 and SaaS applications.
Redstor unifies backup, instant-data recovery and access, archiving, search and data migration through a secure, central console, enabling borderless visibility of Focusnetwork’s entire data estate at any time, on any device.
Ian said: “Traditionally schools have had tapes. The county council would typically come in, set up an admin server, put in a tape drive, create a
little script and say ‘click on this and that will back up your SIMS, your SMS and your data drive’. Some people have been doing that for years. “I was at a school recently and they said, ‘we changed our admin server a couple of months ago – and when we checked it, we found the backup had not been working for seven years’. “No-one had been aware of this, though, because the council does not monitor the backup and the admin staff do not know how to verify to see if the backup was working. “A backup is only any good when it’s verified. That’s why Redstor is so good because it provides that verification and sends an email to confirm it.”
Ian said: “Like the legal and financial sectors, schools have to be able to go back seven years with their data. They have to protect their financial details and all the safeguarding information on pupils.It would be catastrophic to lose that data and the school would be reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office if that were to happen. Also they have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation that has been recently introduced.
Deployed and configured in 15 minutes, Redstor has made data management tasks smaller and simpler for Focusnetworks and the schools they serve. Ian said: “Our previous backup solution was not working as intended. There was very little reporting too. We had to go in manually and would find a document had not been imported, or a backup had failed, but not been reported – it would cost us a lot of manual time.
“With Redstor we save ourselves 15 to 20 minutes per site. The console emails us reports, the client sends us an email every night and someone looks at the console every week to monitor the backups. It’s a massive manual overhead that we save by using Redstor. “The failure rate is maybe 2 or 3% - and that will be because of an onsite problem - something like a file being locked or an issue with a server – nothing to do with Redstor. “Once we log into the portal, we can quickly see from the colour-coding if there is a problem and target the ones that might need attention. It has made our lives much easier – but even more importantly it gives us total confidence in the product so we can say to the customer ‘you can rest assured that your data is backed up’.”