30 January 2014

EasiPC Services supports just under 100 schools across Northamptonshire with an onsite package that includes technicians who provide ongoing maintenance.

Founded in 2008, EasiPC Services’ aim is to provide a flexible and cost effective ICT technician service to schools in Northamptonshire. It currently supports just under 100 schools across the county with an onsite package that includes technicians who provide ongoing maintenance.

Because of its responsibility of protecting vital data for such a large number of schools, it was essential for EasiPC to offer a secure and reliable backup solution. The firm found that the majority of its schools already had existing tape and disk backup solutions in place. However, due to the time and labour intensive nature of such systems, it also discovered that a lot of schools were failing to perform critical backup related tasks such as swapping tapes or ensuring they were taken offsite.

EasiPC director Jezz Botterill takes up the story: “The backups simply weren’t  happening because it was left to the schools to implement them – the process of placing data on removable disks and transporting them was a major barrier. This  was causing us, as well as the schools, significant headaches when data went missing.”

The company also had to contend with the dated hardware and software that most of the schools used, much of which offered little (if any) encryption. “Of  those that were backing up data and transporting offsite, most were not encrypting the data first – presenting various security pitfalls and legal issues,” says Botterill.

As a result, EasiPC required a secure and automated backup solution which removed any responsibility from the schools and ensured data were encrypted to the highest standard offsite and whilst in transit. It has now implemented the Redstor Backup for Schools (RBUSS) Service in 20 of its schools. This completely automates the backup process and ensures that data are encrypted to the highest levels.

EasiPC can monitor the backups from a central location, and the system also enables restores to be performed at the click of a button. As an example, Botterill describes one instance where a bursar somehow managed to delete the entire admin area on a school’s server. “(This) could have been a disaster with the old backup system. With RBUSS, we were able to restore all their data within six minutes.”

Botterill adds that the automated nature of RBUSS has meant that his team now spends less time on sorting out bad or broken tapes and trying to restore data that might not have been backed up in the first place.