CS Jan Feb 2022

Arcserve - PROOFED BW.qxd 10-Feb-22 10:36 AM Page 1
backup
FURNESS COLLEGE ENJOYS 50% SAVINGS IN
BACKUP COSTS WITH ARCSERVE APPLIANCES
IN-BUILT RANSOMWARE PROTECTION ENABLES RAPID RECOVERY OF INDIVIDUAL FILES AND EMAILS
Darren Stevens, IT manager, Furness
College: Arcserve dashboards show at
a glance that we're consistently meeting
our recovery time objectives.
More than 4,000 students are
progressing their education at
Furness College to improve their
future job prospects, via a range of fulltime,
part-time and distance learning
courses. The college needs to protect
student and staff work against
ransomware attacks, hardware failure
and accidental deletion to safeguard
student grades and the college's
reputation. Arcserve appliances enabled
the college to make a 50% cost saving
on backup. With in-built ransomware
protection, the solution enables rapid
recovery of individual files and emails.
THE CHALLENGE
A team of around 350 faculty and staff
support the college's students.
Safeguarding staff and student files
against ransomware attacks, hardware
issues and accidental deletion or
corruption is essential to protecting
student grades.
"We can't expect all our students and
staff to be IT-savvy, so it's our
responsibility to make sure that their
work is safeguarded against the risk
of data loss," says Darren Stevens, IT
manager at Furness College. "If work
is lost, it could impact the college's
reputation, as well as students' grades
and potentially their choice of career
going forwards. We weren't completely
happy with the functionality and
performance of our existing solution.
The backup window was stretching into
the morning, it was time-consuming
to find and restore individual files and
emails, and, with all backups held in the
cloud, it took too long to recover data."
THE SOLUTION
Furness College rolled out two Arcserve
appliances in May 2021. The team
selected Arcserve appliances, due
to their inbuilt protection against
ransomware with Sophos Intercept X,
and a cost reduction of 50% compared
to the college's previous backup solution,
it states.
"There was a spike in ransomware
attacks on colleges and universities
during lockdown," states Daniel Walker,
network infrastructure lead at Furness
College. "We had briefings about
the increased risk from JISC (Joint
Information Systems Committee) -
which provides our academic network -
so we were keen to add an extra layer of
protection with the Arcserve solution."
Furness College has an Arcserve
appliance at its two campuses, each
backing up a different subset of servers,
with a total of 32 servers and nearly
600TB of recoverable data protected.
Using the Arcserve appliance's
snapshots, the college can recover files
or even a complete server in minutes.
"We use the solution on a regular basis
for recovering individual student and
staff files, and emails that have been
accidentally deleted or overwritten,
without having to roll back the entire
server," he adds.
The appliance's automated testing
feature, Arcserve Assured Recovery,
provides complete confidence that,
in the event of an incident, data can
be restored completely and without
impacting its integrity.
THE RESULT
With the Arcserve appliances, Furness
College's IT team can restore services,
lost or deleted files and emails four times
faster, which safeguards staff work and
student grades. "Arcserve dashboards
show at a glance that we're consistently
meeting our recovery time objectives
(RTO)," says Stevens. "The solution is very
easy to manage and run on a day-to-day
basis, which means the IT team is free
to focus on supporting users. With the
Arcserve appliances, we've reduced costs
and mitigated the risk of a ransomware
attack. We can protect business
continuity and the college's reputation."
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