Johannesburg, 14 Jun 2018
One of the oldest local governments in the world, Somerset County Council in the UK, was looking for a backup solution that could meet their ever-growing data footprint requirement and aligns with their strategy of moving to the cloud.
"The biggest problems we had were with flexibility and scalability. We had racks and racks of disks, and we had to wait a long time to get new hardware. The complexities with the product itself also introduced many challenges," says Dean Cridland, senior IT officer at Somerset County Council.
Somerset deployed Azure Backup Server to backup diverse workloads which included VMWare virtual machines, Microsoft SQL Server databases, files/folder backup, system state backup for Windows server and Exchange backup.
With Azure Backup's seamless integration, Somerset was able to minimise the on-premises backup footprint by keeping the data locally only for a day and then moving it to Azure, where it's retained for 30 days.
By implementing a 1-Gbps Azure ExpressRoute connection, 70% of which is utilised for backup and restore, the council was able to meet its backup service level agreements.
Simple user interface combined with minimum on-premises infrastructure also helped to improve agility as they can now rapidly scale up or down their backup environment. The new solution takes less than a week to deploy a new backup server which previously took months.
"With our Azure hybrid cloud solution, we can now meet increasing government requirements for disaster recovery and business continuity," explains Cridland.
Azure Backup Server comes with a pay-as-you-go model. Moreover, with minimum on-premises infrastructure they only need to provision the resources required today, versus paying for hardware that was sized to support future requirements. This helped them significantly reduce their costs.
"Compared with our previous backup solution, our Azure solution costs significantly less to run," says Andy Kennell, ICT Operations Manager at Somerset.
Somerset IT team works closely with Microsoft product teams: Microsoft helps them optimise their backups and in turn they provide feedback.
"As we continue our digital transformation, wide aspects of our infrastructure are changing, and so are our processes and personnel," says Cridland.
"Navigating all this with a company like Microsoft is paying dividends. We have a more cohesive IT solution and we can discuss technology roadmaps with product teams from a technical and business perspective. They tell us what's coming, and we tell them what we need.
"This kind of dialogue is unique, and it helps us with our long-term strategy, so we can provide better services and leadership for our community."
Read the full Somerset County Council case study.
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