IT support team focus on giving schools best value for money

The Bucks County Council Schools Technical Support team provides a day-to-day service to more than 140 schools, helping them make effective use of information and communication technologies across their curriculum and admin networks.

Reliability with flexibility

As a commercial unit within Bucks CC, the Schools Technical Support Team are only too aware that they need to offer a personalised, responsive service of the highest quality, as well as excellent value for money - or schools will look elsewhere. Faced with constantly evolving data management challenges, the Support Team have relied on Redstor to deliver a simpler, smarter and safer solution for more than 12 years.

Simon Hobdell, Technical Team Leader, said: “We are a self-funding team within the council and I work very closely with Redstor to ensure we are getting best value for money and the utmost reliability.

Redstor can be relied on totally - both for backups and for quick recoveries of files and servers if there’s an issue. It absolutely fits our needs now and is constantly evolving to fit our future needs"

Simon Hobdell, Technical Team Leader

Redstor Back Up Service for Schools (RBUSS) ensures compliance with the Data Protection Act, Information Commissioner’s Office and Schools Financial Value Standards guidance by guaranteeing that critical data is securely and automatically backed up offsite daily.

Are you happy with the time it takes to monitor backups every week?

No, it takes far too long
I'm sure it could be a bit quicker
Yes, it hardly takes any time

Simon said: “RBUSS protects approximately 26TB of data for our schools, ranging from little nurseries to big secondary schools. About 130 back up just their admin network - school office SIMS and SMS databases and files associated with the day-to-day running of the school. Others choose to protect the curriculum too - basically all file types on every device in the whole school.“By purchasing our admin offering, schools get 50GB of RBUSS, so it’s very much part of the service we offer. RBUSS is also certified for usage with SIMS, so it has plug-ins for backing up SIMS databases.“As well as providing offsite backup, Redstor has the added value of being a Disaster Recovery solution, ensuring data is available without any issue in the event of the school’s complete destruction.Redstor's RBUSS is a fully automated, policy-driven cloud backup and recovery service that allows the Schools Technical Support team to back up and restore all data and files held on their MIS (Admin) Curriculum and school systems.
Data is compressed, encrypted and securely transferred to Redstor’s primary data centre before being securely transferred to Redstor's secondary data centre for redundancy.

Redstor enables us to make sure the crucial data, specifically SIMS, is backed up - and we can rely on it being backed up. That’s the most important thing.

Simon Hobdell, Technical Team Leader

Challenges

Recovering schools’ data speedily

Ensuring schools’ critical data is securely and automatically backed up offsite daily, reducing backup management overheads

Finding a solution that offers expert support

Providing schools with a data management service of the highest quality that also offers excellent value for money

Calculating what schools owe and providing them with an accurate figure for what their future spend will be

Solution

InstantData, Redstor’s unique on-demand streaming technology

Fast, cost-effective, automated offsite backup

Support provided by an organisation that is both the technology vendor and infrastructure owner

Redstor’s RBUSS, a fully automated, policy-driven online backup and recovery service

A pricing model that is subscription-based, simple, cost-effective and predictable

Key benefits

No need to wait for full recovery as schools gain immediate access to data, radically reducing the impact of security incidents, data breaches and hardware failure

IT team manage by exception, reducing time spent on data management admin and visiting sites every week

Fast 24/7/365 access to a support team that draws on 20 years’ knowledge and experience

Reduce complexity and save time and money with a data management solution that enables GDPR compliance and meets the Schools Financial Value Standards

With Redstor, you only pay for what you use with a transparent cost per GB. Easy installation and lack of hardware makes it simple and straightforward to scale up or down as demand changes