Case Study - Call Plus

Introduction

CALL is a Greater Manchester Charity providing emotional support and home-based practical help to people with cancer and other life-limiting illnesses, along with those closest to them, such as family, friends and carers.

CALL has five offices in the Manchester area and each office requires to backup its data to guard against computer breakdown and disasters such as fire, flood or theft.

Problems Identified

Secure and regular data backups are necessary and were time consuming and unreliable. To rely on staff members to perform the task daily was becoming harder to achieve as was the security of the chosen media being used.

All vital data is stored on the CALL’s computer system and this data has grown over time and will continue to do so, and must be backed up daily.

Data Backup procedures

Each branch backed up their data manually to either CD/DVD or to a memory stick. This method was found to be time consuming unreliable and insecure. One thought was to change and use an external hard drive but to source one for each branch worked out to be costly, would not reduce staff input and would still need to be stored off site when not in use for security reasons.

Requirement

To establish and implement a more secure, reliable, and fully managed data backup procedure.

Research and Solution

It was decided that the way forward was to use an online data backup service provider. On searching the internet several offerings may be seen but CALL wanted a system that was easy to understand and install, easy to operate, offered flexibility as to when the backup could be done, allowed for growth and that would be cost affective. They also insisted on using a UK company to ensure their data was not being sent half way around the world.

Safe Data Storage Limited were found to offer a solution which satisfies all the criteria:

It provides easy to install software to both encrypt and compress the data prior to its backup for efficiency resulting in an improvement in data security and backup efficiency.
It provides an easy set up for the backup of an individual computer or server.
One account accommodates several computers.
It provides the facility on each computer to select SPECIFIC folders to be backed up, so that you can select the critical data to be securely backed up.
When a backup is to be performed it can be specified in two ways
- at a specified time on a weekly or daily basis
- optionally at LOGON and SHUTDOWN. In the case of SHUTDOWN the system will automatically be locked and then shut down after the backup is finished.
It allows for easy recovery of any file/folder from any backup thus allowing a restore/ recovery to a different computer to the one it originally existed from anywhere in the world that has Internet access.
It is fully managed by experts leaving staff free to concentrate on more important tasks.
They are a UK company and store data, fully encrypted and password protected, in UK data centres.
Their service is friendly, jargon free and professional.