Education
Data Backup and Business Continuity
Challenge
The customer is a local school educational trust with 4 secondary schools. They cover ages from 11 to 18 across 4 sites and running a mix of technology. The important part of the technology they run is a bespoke school application set. This set of applications runs and managed everything in the schools from attendance, rotas, school room planning and grades. The issue is that if the application set stopped working or a site lost the data the school would stop working for anything from a short to an indefinite period of time. The issue that they saw was around backups during the day and overnight.
Solution
The customer needed a partner that could work with them rather than try and replace the complete application set. Due to being an educational trust attached to local authority they were not able to change things too much. Working with Lanmark the educational trust started using a backup solution that took backups throughout the day. The solution then backed the data up off-site overnight.
The idea behind this is that if the site lost the local application the local backups would take over and act as the server. This would allow the team at Lanmark to step in, work with the IT team and get the purpose build hardware working ASAP. If there was an issue at the sites, like a flood, then the backup off-site would then take over making sure that the teaching and admin staff would have as little downtime as possible. The other work Lanmark perform is support for the IT team. This is in the form of cover during holidays and sickness. Lanmark also gets involved with project work such as moving from Exchange to Office 365. Lanmark help architect the project and took certain work packets helping the team where needed.
Partnership
The team at Lanmark worked with the staff at the trust and meet with the management staff monthly. The relationship is so strong that the senior team at the trust have regular calls and meeting with the team to discuss movements and changes in the industry to understand if this would affect them and how they operate. Rarely is back up discussed and all involved see this as positive. Lanmark has become the go-to IT search engine for the IT team. The part Lanmark takes here is helping the team understand where they want to go as well as helping with some server monitoring. This fills in the gaps in both knowledge and tools that the IT team wouldn’t normally have.
Results
The most important thing about this whole service is the management and teaching staff know they have a partner that has their data safe! The team know that they will not lose any data and on top of this, the senior team know, in a very changing environment, that IT is one less thing they need to worry about! The part Lanmark play with the IT team is bringing knowledge and expertise they wouldn’t normally have.