Thanks to a unique solution that is built for the cloud, Furze-Warren Hard Federation’s network manager is now able to discover, manage, control and protect the data of three 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.
Chidi said: “I have the one console and I can see everything. Working remotely is a major advantage as well. Getting a file from Redstor is like attaching a map to drive. You can do it from anywhere - any site or even at home. That’s a massive bonus.”
Multiple copies of backups are held securely encrypted in UK data centres. The encryption key is set by the customer, ensuring no unauthorised access.
This is particularly important for schools, who have to retain their last seven years of data, protecting financial details and safeguarding information on pupils.
Deployed and configured in 15 minutes, Redstor has made data management tasks smaller and simpler for Chidi and the schools whose IT requirements he looks after. By switching from tape-based backups, Chidi has enjoyed massive time savings and he can now see more quickly if there is a problem. He said: “I would not advise my enemy to go to tapes. It was horrendous. I used to do differential backups for the three different schools – going in every morning to get the tape out, making sure it was labelled properly and changing tapes for all three on a daily basis was hellish. “I would spend eight hours per week going back and forth between sites just to change tapes. For this reason we were only able to do a full backup twice a week which just wasn’t good enough. There was one particular occasion, where I tried to run a restore and found that one of the tapes had been misplaced and therefore wouldn’t complete the process. “Whilst this wasn’t a serious issue, it made me realise that we could no longer rely on tapes and needed a backup solution that was more reliable.”
The time taken to complete a backup has dropped to less than an hour with Redstor’s fully automated service – and Chidi spends less time sorting out incomplete backups.
A notification email is sent each morning to assure him that the backup was a success.