CASE STUDY

Suffolk County Council
Achieves Greater ROI
with Cohesity

Located in southeastern England, Suffolk County Council (SCC) operates across sixsites, providing services including planning, waste management, schools, social
INDUSTRY
Government
USE CASE
Backup and Recovery, DisasterRecovery
COHESITY SOLUTIONS
DataProtect, SmartFiles
WORKLOADSMicrosoft SQL
OracleVMwareNutanix
CHANNEL PARTNER
Bytes

care, business support, and libraries. Staff are supported by an IT team of 30
delivering network, server, and cloud infrastructure, data centre management,
system availability monitoring, backup, recovery, and storage of data.

Challenges
Head of Design and Platforms, Simon Mason, and Mark Fox, Senior Technical Lead, were aware there
were some gaps in capabilities, including a lack of ability to perform complete SCC backups within theavailable time frame, with the result that not all data was protected. This created stress across theteam, who feared it might be unable to fulfill a request to restore key files.
The leaders’ primary concern was to rectify the situation with a focus on both recovery of individual
files and the restore of systems more broadly. In addition, they were engaged in a whole-systemre-evaluation which involved examining primary data storage, with a longer-term goal of moving onpremises storage to the cloud.
A gap analysis set alongside strategic and forward-looking ambitions led to the following priorities:
achieve a smaller footprint in primary and disaster recovery data centres; move to a more modern
data protection platform; reduce operational costs around support and backup/restore; and improve
the ability to recover both individual files and complete filesystems.

Key Benefits• Operational time savings ofmore than 87%• Data recovery time decreasedby over 80%• Total annual cost savings of£80,000• Ransomware protection““It is exciting that we have been able to be more innovative by working
with Cohesity. Having a multicloud data management solution in place
has provided significant cost savings, faster and more efficient backup andrecovery times, as well as giving us peace of mind for ransomware protection.”
Simon Mason, Head of Design and Platforms

CASE STUDY | Suffolk County CouncilSolution
Cohesity was initially engaged to install a data management solution
capable of completing full backups with Cohesity DataProtect. Thesolution was deployed at two sites, each of which was provisioned
with a Cohesity cluster. In each case, these were used for backup andrecovery, and also for running Microsoft SQL, Oracle, Dell Compellent
NAS, and VMware workloads.
With this solution in place, a complete NAS backup was always
possible. Thus, Simon and Fox had confidence they could restore any
file requested. The Cohesity solution replaced the legacy, manual
mechanisms used for protecting Oracle data with industry standards.
This eased the backup process and assured Simon and Fox they could
flex and scale the solution as needed in the future.
Simon and Fox decided to engage Cohesity for a second use caseto implement a short-term file share with Cohesity SmartFiles aspart of the data centre refresh project. SCC needed a solution in thetransition to protect both Nutanix AHV and VMware hypervisors.
The refresh also included an all-flash architecture to store data,
which was the first such implementation in the EMEA region. The
all-flash architecture is faster than more conventional solutions, andwas therefore the ideal platform for SCC’s file service solution. Thisinstallation was deployed across two sites and designed to havethe immediate effect of increasing general NAS file access speeds,
supporting workload sharing, and improving file access times. In
addition, the deployment was an interim measure on the road to
moving on-premises storage to cloud, which serves the organization
now and future-proofs its investment with the introduction of the all-He said, “We work with a lot of external technical providers onquite large, quite complex solutions, and this was one of themost positive experiences we have had. Our pre-sales contact
was very knowledgeable and made himself available for detailed
discussions to provide technical expertise. The engineer assigned
for implementation of the backup and restore solution was also
excellent. Our technical team were really impressed.”

Results
SCC’s IT support service has achieved efficiency savings and speed
gains, and established greater confidence in the quality of its
backup and restore service. Individual VMs and files from months
into the past can reliably be retrieved and restored thanks to theefficiency of DataProtect and SmartFiles. Moreover, there is room
to expand and flex requirements as the organization evolves. As amarket leader, Simon is certain that the Cohesity multicloud data
management solution will continue to exceed requirements. “It isexciting that we have been able to be more innovative by working
with Cohesity and now have greater confidence in terms of ease ofmaintenance of the platform.”
Furthermore, using flash provides a degree of future-proofing as
it is advanced technology. Cohesity all-flash can be deployed into anew role as SCC continues its digital transformation, which includes
moving data from on-premises to cloud.
Implementation took four months; a massive reduction compared tothe previous Dell EMC implementation which had taken 18 months. SCC
has also seen significant ROI benefits amounting to £80,000 annually,

flash node into the cloud-based backup cluster later.

with immediate cost savings as soon as the new platform was live.

The increasing prevalence of ransomware targeting government

The Cohesity benefits for SCC include:

agency data was another key reason SCC chose Cohesity. As part ofthe comprehensive data management platform, Cohesity featuresrobust data defense capabilities such as immutable backups
supporting ransomware protection, deterrence and recovery.
Across both initiatives, Simon and Fox were pleased with thededication and care demonstrated by the Cohesity team frompre-sales through implementation and beyond. Simon explainedthat this was a key factor in the decision to purchase the Cohesity
all-flash solution.

• Operational time savings of more than 87%• Data recovery time decreased by over 80%• Total annual cost savings of £80,000• Ransomware protection• Faster and complete data backups

About Suffolk County Council
Suffolk County Council is the administrative authority for thecounty of Suffolk, England. It is run by 75 elected county councillors
representing 63 divisions.

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