The Faculty of Public Health (FPH) is the membership organisation for the leaders in UK public health, working closely with its specialist members to stimulate national and international debates on promoting, protecting and improving public health.

FPH had been using a traditional tape based backup system but found that it had several limitations where not all data was being backed up every night, failures were frequent, processes were time consuming and labour intensive and there was no backup plan in case of a disaster. Due to these limitations and the increasing volume and complexity of its data storage requirements, FPH required a more sophisticated and reliable backup solution, for its Microsoft Windows based network.

Premier IT was successfully awarded the contract (post tender) to provide FPH with an efficient backup system and set about implementing its advanced online backup solution, a dual vault solution with no single point of failure.

This involved:

•  taking a full initial data backup at FPH’s office, by   a Premier IT storage expert, and physically  transporting it to our secure collocation centre
•  installing an onsite, local vault to enable FPH to  retain a full copy of data onsite. This backup vault  has no storage restrictions, within the capacity of  the hardware
•  implementing a highly secure and flexible Virtual  Private Network (VPN) to transfer data via the  internet. This is used to back up data to a second  secure storage area at Premier IT’s offsite  collocation centre

The local vault is set up to take full and frequent incremental backups while incremental backups are taken daily to the offsite vault. A full backup is taken onsite every month. Data is double encrypted for security purposes – 128bit encryption at file level and 256bit (with 2048 bit key) at tunnel (VPN) level.

The solution includes an advanced monitoring system with automated alerting. This is managed by Premier IT, meaning that minimal involvement is required from the IT team at FPH, although status and update reports are provided.

To ensure that FPH data is secure in the event of a crisis, the following Disaster Recovery (DR) actions are in place:

• if data is lost, it can be restored quickly from  either the local onsite vault or the remote vault at  Premier IT’s collocation centre, depending on the  size of the restore
• arrangements to take data from the collocation  centre to a temporary location in the event of a  total loss of data, to ensure the business can  continue to operate
• annual Disaster Recovery (DR) simulation testing within a controlled environment and without interruptions to business operations, meaning that if the worst were to happen, DR plans could be rolled out quickly and without error

The implementation of Premier IT’s online backup solution has provided FPH with a secure, reliable and resilient way of recovering data, via a number of different methods, suitable to the level of loss incurred. This helps to ensure the minimum recovery period required. Staff at FPH no longer need to worry about the problem that its tape based backup system was creating and time can be reallocated to other critical IT issues.

FPH can also be confident that it has a sophisticated DR strategy in place and that its new, efficient backup processes are reducing its carbon footprint and contributing to the Faculty’s green agenda.