Customer Case Study

Ascentis safeguards business continuity
and reputation with Arcserve UDP

Industry: Education

CLIENT PROFILE

Organisation: Ascentis
Solution: Arcserve UDP

Ascentis is a UK non-proﬁt organisation helping students to access qualiﬁcations to further their education orcareer. It provides qualiﬁcations for use by schools and colleges as well as by organisations supporting adultlearners returning to education, and has developed software to help students with learning difﬁculties.

PROBLEMSOLUTIONRESULTSTo ensure business continuity

Ascentis deployed ArcserveWith a fast and reliable backup

and protect its reputation

UDP for its backup andsystem, Ascentis has madefor service excellence, thedisaster recovery. The solution

costs savings on storage

organisation needs a robust

deduplicates and backs up 1.6

and freed up resources within

disaster recovery plan. It mustterabytes of data, enabling

the IT department. Replication

also comply with regulationsﬁles, servers and operations tocapabilities add an additional

set by two bodies – QAA forbe restored in minutes in thelayer of protection to ensure

Higher Education and Ofqual.

event of an incident.

compliance and protect
the company’s reputation
as a leading providerof qualiﬁcations.

Ascentis | 1

Customer Case Study

THE PROBLEM
Safeguarding business continuity
The administration of qualiﬁcations is underpinned by IT, from registering students on courses throughto awarding certiﬁcates. Any process failures due to an outage would impact Ascentis’ reputation andinconvenience learners, as well as put the organisation at risk of noncompliance with its regulatory bodies,
QAA for Higher Education, and Ofqual.
“As a growing organisation, our reputation is very important to us,” explains Paul Carroll, Head of IT. “We’rededicated to giving schools and colleges the best possible customer experience, to ensure that they in turncan help students to achieve their goals and ambitions.”
Safeguarding business continuity requires robust data backup and disaster recovery processes. While theorganisation’s existing solution was satisfactory, it’s IT partner, Fantastic Cloud Service, knew of solutions thatwould better meet Ascentis’ needs.

THE SOLUTION
Reliable, low-maintenance data backup
Fantastic Cloud Service set up a pilot to demonstrate how Arcserve UDP could help the organisation makebackup and recovery faster and more efﬁcient. As Carroll recalls, “We ran Arcserve alongside our existing
solution to compare functionality and performance, and beneﬁts quickly became apparent. Arcserve hasmuch faster recovery times and gives us the ﬂexibility to run disaster recovery simulations when we need to.”Arcserve UDP was rolled out across Ascentis’ estate. The solution now backs up all servers, including VMware
and SQL servers, and data is replicated overnight to Fantastic Cloud Service’s cloud environment, where it’sdeduplicated to reduce storage volumes. Servers can be quickly restored in the event of a failure and ﬁlesrecovered in minutes, minimising disruption for users and customers.
“With Arcserve, we can set it and forget it,” comments Carroll. “We conﬁgured our backup and disasterrecovery plans and now just let it run. The solution gives us a report every day so we can see if anything needs
our attention or has failed – which very rarely happens.”
With data supporting every Ascentis business stream backed up and replicated, the company can ensurebusiness continuity even in the event of an outage. “Arcserve allows us to quickly spin up our entire ITenvironment elsewhere if it goes down at our HQ; knowing we’ve got that level of protection means I have one
less thing to worry about in the IT department,” says Carroll.
The solution combined with VMware Instant Clone has also enabled Ascentis to further minimise disruption
by ensuring that its test environment is identical to its production environment. “We can introduce changes
to our live systems more quickly and reliably,” comments Carroll. “The team can task changes quickly before
bringing them into the live environment in minutes: it’s cut down the speed of disaster recovery from eight ornine hours to just a few minutes.”

Ascentis | 2Customer Case Study

THE RESULTS
Safeguarding service quality
As well as ensuring continuity of service, Arcserve UDP is enabling Ascentis to free up resources, both in theIT department and through costs savings.
“We spend around ﬁve minutes a week checking Arcserve reports – that’s a huge time saving compared totraditional tape-based disaster recovery,” explains Carroll.

With Arcserve, we can be sure of maintaining our quality of service, which isvital to our reputation and future growth– Paul Carroll, Head of IT

Arcserve’s superior deduplication capability has also enabled the company to reduce its cloud-hosted storage
footprint from 2.8 terabytes to 1.6 terabytes, making a cost saving of around a third of its previous spend.
With Arcserve UDP, Ascentis can also:•Comply with regulatory requirements•

Safeguard its reputation•

Focus on innovation and supporting its users.

Carroll concludes: “Our backup and disaster recovery processes are smoother and more reliable while saving
time and costs. With Arcserve, we can be sure of maintaining our quality of service, which is vital to ourreputation and future growth.”

For more information on Arcserve, please visit arcserve.com

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