As many as 80 Stockport schools ditched their ageing, time-intensive tape-based backup solution for Redstor’s pioneering data management technology in the space of two months.
The prospect of a more efficient way to protect multi-terabytes of admin data - including crucial financial and sensitive documents - proved highly attractive, recalls Damian Hodkinson, software and IT Development Officer for Stockport Council’s AVA Technical Services.
Another major benefit has been Redstor’s ability to reduce the impact of security incidents, data breaches and hardware failure, while Damian also welcomes the development of a search facility that helps address ever-increasing regulations and compliance issues.
He said: “From a General Data Protection Regulation point of view, deleting data is likely to come into play very soon. I can see this getting very complicated because there will be different retention policies for different types of data.
“We’ll be working with our information governance team at the Town Hall to ensure that we deliver the right information to our schools and then, working with Redstor, to ensure that we are fully compliant.
“If any data needs to be deleted from previous backups or historical backups, then we should be able to do that from the advanced search feature that Redstor are developing.”
“We got the majority of our schools online ready to go very quickly. We were one of the fastest take-ups Redstor had done at the time. We went from no schools to 70 or 80 in a month or two.”
Redstor is designed to have minimal or no human intervention throughout its daily management. Cloud backups run to an automated schedule, allowing IT staff to back up data as little or as often as required, at the click of a button. There is no human error or risk.
Multiple copies of backups are held securely encrypted in UK data centres. The encryption key is set by the customer, ensuring no unauthorised access.