04 April 2025

One Education Ltd provides comprehensive IT support to over 130 schools, academies, and multi-academy trusts across the UK. Managing more than 170 devices, the organisation delivers on-site and remote technical support, internet connectivity, cloud backup, and management information services. A crucial part of their service offering is ensuring reliable data protection, as schools depend on secure and accessible backups for student records, operational data, and critical administrative functions.

Putting data at risk

For years, One Education Ltd had relied on a long-standing backup provider that had initially met their needs. However, over time, the solution’s performance deteriorated to the point of being unreliable. The old system regularly experienced up to 80 failed backups per week, increasing the risk of data loss. IT staff were spending between 20 and 30 hours per week monitoring, troubleshooting, and attempting to fix backup issues. Recovering lost data proved extremely challenging and unpredictable, making it harder to guarantee business continuity for schools.

According to Jonathan Hambleton, Head of IT at One Education Ltd, the previous provider had become difficult to use and time-consuming to manage. The trust in the system had deteriorated to the extent that it became necessary to look for an alternative. With data security and uptime critical to education providers, One Education Ltd needed a highly reliable, easy-to-manage, and efficient backup solution to ensure seamless data recovery and business continuity for their clients.

A scalable and efficient backup system

After conducting a rigorous evaluation of eight backup vendors, One Education Ltd selected Cove Data Protection from N-able as the ideal solution. The decision was driven by Cove’s superior functionality, ease of deployment, time efficiency, and seamless integration with other N-able products already in use. The transition to Cove allowed One Education Ltd to implement an automated, cloud-native backup and recovery system that significantly reduced manual intervention, while intuitive reporting and alerts ensured transparency on backup status.

With Cove’s simplified management and monitoring features, the team could now diagnose issues quickly and resolve any backup failures without extended troubleshooting. Previously, fixing errors would often take so long that the next scheduled backup would begin before the previous one was fully resolved. Cove eliminated this issue, ensuring a smooth, uninterrupted backup process.

“The product we were using previously had a significant number of failed backups,” explains Jonathon Gandy Senior IT Consultant, One Education Ltd. “Cove functions better from the get-go and failed backups are rare. On top of that, diagnosing issues is very quick because Cove gives you far greater insight into the reason(s) for a failure.”

Deployment was rapid, and the solution was rolled out across all supported schools in just a few hours, minimising disruption. One Education Ltd was particularly impressed with Cove’s ability to integrate seamlessly with the other five N-able products they were already using.

The shift to Cove Data Protection delivered immediate and measurable improvements, significantly reducing the administrative burden and ensuring greater backup reliability. Since implementation, backup failures have become rare, a stark contrast to the 80 failed backups per week that had been a regular occurrence with the previous provider.

One of the most significant benefits was the drastic reduction in time spent managing backups. Previously, IT staff had been dedicating between 20 and 30 hours per week to backup administration. With Cove, that workload has been reduced to just two hours per week or less. The automation of key tasks, such as ticket creation and reporting, transformed backup management into a nearly hands-off process, allowing the team to focus on delivering high-quality IT support to schools instead of firefighting backup failures.

Data recovery has also become a seamless process. Whereas previous data restorations had been time-consuming and unreliable, Cove enables rapid, stress-free recovery when needed. The increased efficiency has led to improved business continuity for schools and greater confidence in the backup system.

Future-proofing data protection for schools

By adopting Cove Data Protection, One Education Ltd has strengthened its IT service offering, ensuring that schools have a reliable, automated, and highly efficient backup solution. The reduction in manual workload, improvement in backup success rates, and seamless system integration have all contributed to a higher standard of IT support for educational institutions.

With a fully cloud-based, automated system now in place, backup management has moved from being an unmanageable burden to a streamlined and efficient process. The move has also improved profitability by freeing up IT staff time for higher-value tasks, while schools benefit from a more secure and resilient backup infrastructure.
According to Jonathan Hambleton, Head of IT, One Education Ltd, the transformation has been remarkable: “With Cove, management overheads have moved from unmanageable to minimal, to the point where we almost feel like we could ‘set it and forget it,’ allowing us to focus on delivering high quality support.”

“The amount of man hours we’ve saved is invaluable. It’s night and day to our previous solution and we’ve never had something like that before,” adds Jonathon Gandy Senior IT Consultant, One Education Ltd.

The success of the migration has reinforced One Education Ltd’s reputation as a trusted IT partner for schools, providing a secure, scalable, and efficient backup infrastructure that safeguards critical educational data.