Castle Vale Community Housing has recently upgraded its business continuity and backup services from ICM Business Continuity, with the new contract worth around £20,000 per year. The contract includes cloud-based managed online backup and offsite data storage, and tried-and-tested recovery provision with replacement hardware delivered onsite via ICM’s highly-resilient business continuity centres.
The upgrade of the ICM contract to a cloud-based service follows CVCHA’s decision to move away from its tape-based backup and recovery processes due to their lack of reliability, increasing data volumes and growing pressure on IT resources.
Mohammed Sarfraz, IT & network administrator, Castle Vale Community Housing Association, said, “We need to ensure our systems are available, data isn’t lost and we have access to up-to-date information to run our business, for people to work productively, and to serve tenants who expect to receive high levels of service. That means we need reliable disaster and data recovery capabilities – in short, recovery assurance.”
The new contract extends the services that ICM has been providing CVCHA since 2005. ICM’s Online Data Backup service is fully integrated with its ‘traditional’ managed recovery services, providing rapid recovery and business continuity at any of its 18 business continuity centres located across the UK. The new service includes the option to ‘pay as you grow’ to accommodate changing demands.
12 servers support business-critical activities, including two Citrix servers, two SQL Servers, the core housing management system, a finance server and a file and print server, all of which are covered by ICM’s traditional and cloud-based Recovery Assurance services.
Sarfraz said, “Tape backups meant additional time and resource, and it took longer to restore when problems arose. We can now restore instantly from the same day while wasting less time to do so, plus the offsite process managed by ICM is very fast.
“We have run numerous tests, at least twice a year, and invoked the service at least once a year if a server fails for example, and every time it’s been a success.”
