Eliminating the need for capital expenditure
The People's Dispensary for Sick Animals is the UK's leading vet charity. Operating through a UK-wide network of 48 Pet Hospitals, the PDSA provides low cost and free veterinary care to the sick and injured pets of people in need and promotes responsible pet ownership.
Having true cloud-to-cloud protection for Office 365 was a crucial requirement when the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals started transitioning their core infrastructure to the cloud.
The last thing the PDSA wanted to do was splash out for additional on-premise hardware to back up O365 data - at the very time their staff of more than 2,000 were moving steadily towards storing data in the cloud rather than onsite.
Underpinning the PDSA’s forward-thinking IT strategy was a desire to make the most of OneDrive, O365’s cloud file-storage service.
There was no question, though, of the PDSA assuming that data stored within O365 would automatically be protected against loss or accidental deletion. Storing sensitive data with a single provider, even one of Microsoft’s size, was a risk they were not prepared to take. The charity also wanted to define specific O365 retention periods to ensure they were adequately protected and that the PDSA was meeting its legal obligations. Utilising Redstor, the PDSA ensure that all live O365 data can also be accessed from Redstor’s cloud in the event of an emergency, thereby retaining full control over the accessibility and protection of their data.
In the event of accidental deletion or a ransomware attack, staff can be sure of on-demand access to all 21TB of protected data - irrespective of whether it’s stored onsite or in the cloud.
The PDSA currently have two data centres – one live at Fareham and one DR site at the head office in Telford - as well as a donation centre just outside Birmingham, a call centre in Sunderland, 48 pet hospitals and more than 120 shops.
By offering borderless visibility of local and online data, Redstor enables organisations to monitor usage at any time, on any device - and set policies across their entire estates.
This enables the charity to assign consistent protection policies across its entire data estate, as well as simplify and automate data management with one central, easy-to-use system.
Infrastructure manager Parmy Rayet said: “We have file servers, web servers, database servers - a lot we are potentially moving into the cloud.
“We decided to migrate a lot of users to O365 just before the summer of 2018. As we moved more and more people, we obviously needed to keep a backup of it all. Everyone at our head office is on OneDrive and our shop users are about to go on OneDrive.”
By having a separate backup strategy that is in the cloud, PDSA have enjoyed significant savings.
We don’t have to buy more physical hardware, look for another data centre or worry about the location of our data - and what we pay for Redstor is cheap compared to hardware and data centre costs.”
Parmy Rayet, Infrastructure Manager at the PDSA
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Avoid having all of the PDSA’s Office 365 data stored with a single provider
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Managing and protecting data efficiently whether it’s onsite or in the cloud
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Finding a solution that is quick to deploy, secure and easy to manage
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The need to avoid splashing out on expensive new infrastructure
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Addressing increasing regulation and compliance issues
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Adopt a separate backup strategy for Office 365 data to retain full control
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Borderless visibility of entire, complex data estate at any time, on any device through a centralised management console
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Intelligent, secure, policy-driven automation and sophisticated reporting that can be set up within 15 minutes
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True cloud-to-cloud protection - with no need for capital expenditure
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A data management solution that delivers global search as well as reliable backup and recovery, archiving and disaster recovery
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Instant access to Office 365 data in the event of accidental deletion or a ransomware attack
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A consistent data protection policy across whole estate, viewing cloud and onsite data in one place
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Quick and easy centralised management of data in Office 365 without circumventing O365 security and auditing
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Capability to auto-scale protection as demand changes
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Address e-discovery requirements and comply with General Data Protection Regulation by searching and actioning all data wherever it resides