Helping St Michael’s Hospice to replace an old backup system

St. Michael’s Hospice in Hampshire enables anyone faced with a life-limiting illness, their families and carers, to attain the highest possible quality of life by providing a choice of specialist care and support.

The Project:

The hospice was having lots of problems with its old IT tape-based backup system, including lack of capacity and regular backup failures. It was also becoming cumbersome due to the requirement to manually insert tapes and staff having to collect and deliver off-site tapes.

There was also no backup at all at weekends or bank holidays due to a lack of resource able to change the tapes. There was also no option to backup non-server systems with the tapes either.

The Hampshire Business Computers Solution:

We set up and installed a new Datto Siris total data protection appliance to replace the outdated and inconvenient tape system. This new offering included off-site backup to a data centre, using an existing connectivity solution. It also featured:

• Full backups of all servers/systems using a single agent
  
• Mission critical systems backed up several times daily including weekends and bank holidays providing backup continuity
  
• Ability to restore from the Datto appliance without manually inserting tapes
  
• Ability to spin up virtual servers on local appliance or in cloud providing enhanced DR and business continuity
  
• All servers/systems DR tested daily proving secure backup achieved
  
• Scalable solution should additional storage be required or longer retention/archive periods

The Result:

A fully automated solution which requires no manual intervention. The hospice receives daily emails from the system confirming the status of all its backups which means any issues are flagged up with them and the external support company straight away.

“The timing for installing the Datto solution coincided with the security breach within the NHS who was affected by ransomware. Datto inspects the backups for ‘ransomware signatures’ allowing the customer to off-line affected systems on on-line earlier unaffected backups to reduce business impact. This solution is critical to the operations of our organisation. If our communications hub were totally destroyed by fire I know all the system and data is secure in one of Datto’s data centres providing the ability to re-create the environment.

The fact each day I receive a screen image of a fully secured server login screen that has been recreated in a virtual environment provides reassurance the backup is good, I used to do this once a year by sending tapes off-site to be restored and tested – now I do this for all systems everyday and it is fully automated. It is one of the best solutions I have ever come across and industry contacts I know have either purchased the same for their organisations or adopted the product for their customers.”

Berny Meunier, Head of ICT, St. Michael’s Hospice