Is Co-operation the way forward for Local Authorities?

One of the cornerstones of the Coalition Government being formed earlier this year was their promise to streamline public services in order to deliver cost savings on the nation's route out of the recession.

Part of this may come in the form of Local Authorities being given the incentive to deliver services to other areas outside of their Geographical remit - you can read more here. This would see Local Authorities recognised more as Commercial organisations and given the ability to act as such. Local Authorities would be able to cut costs by launching shared services - this would in turn enable them to hit their targets for the Carbon Reduction Scheme by sharing Data Centres instead of running and maintaining separate Data Centres.

Redstor have been working with our Local Authority partners to provide services that make their lives and jobs easier by helping them deliver shared services. Instead of each individual Local Authority investing in their own new Data Centres to power backup solutions; 85 of them now backup their data to our Data Centres through RBUSS which allows us all to save energy and have a greener approach to ICT.

Through our Remote Management & Monitoring tool CentraStage, Local Authorities can automate repetitive tasks and share knowledge pools of which tasks to automate in order to free up resources. Dozens of Local Authorities are already working in this manner to co-operate and help each other do more with less.

Education Investor Awards 2010 - 1 week to go

This time next week a number of the Redstor team will be donning their gladrags for the 2010 Education Investor Awards at The Grosvenor House Hotel on London's Park Lane.

The Education Investor Awards celebrate innovation and excellence in the UK's education industry and Redstor have been nominated in the category of "Best Supplier to the Education sector".

Redstor's Managing Director, Paul Evans said "We are very proud to have been nominated for this award following our continued hard work in the Education sector over the past 5 years. We are now working with over 85 Local Authority partners who address 14,000 schools to deliver relevant services that simplify their lives and enable them to focus on high value tasks and efforts. As part of our work with those partners we have introduced new services such as CentraStage, our device management tool and RBUSS Mobile which is our laptop encryption and backup service. We are also looking at other new technologies to launch in the new year to address the challenges of 21st century ICT service delivery. Now, we are all looking forward to enjoying the awards!"

Are you struggling to protect your data?

Redstor have today made available a best practice guide for organisations to download simply by clicking here.

The guide gives useful tips and advice on data protection and device management within the modern Digital age, with the rise of mobile devices in the corporate space seemingly endless.

One of our cloud services which does enable organisations to further protect data is Redstor Protector which is policy driven and combines Backup, Data Deletion, Device Trace, Port Access Control and Encryption.

For further information, please call our Reading office on 0118 9515 200.

Backup Issues and Online Backup

The 360IT event in Earl’s Court London yesterday it highlighted some key data protection issues within the IT industry particularly within the UK. UK based SME’s are amongst the least prepared for disaster recovery planning.

Key figures from the research highlighted the following:

· 44%* did not have the ability to recover data to alternative hardware.
· 50%* of those surveyed admitted to suffering the consequences of downtime at some point in the last 6 months.
*(of 70 SME’s surveyed by Acronis)

Further researched conducted by Vanson Bourne surveyed 600 SME’s which produced some intriguing results.

· 72% of SME’s still rely on an end of day backup strategy which for smaller organisations is recommended, however, considering the survey questioned organisations with the number of employees ranging from 250-1,000 one may expected the hourly incremental data changes to be significant with the potential for data loss to be unthinkable should such a situation arise.
· 10% of SME’s only carry out weekly backups.
· The research also highlighted that for companies whose core competencies are not in IT backup and recovery issues can be extremely stressful with 59% of IT managers feeling stressed and under pressure to deliver.
· In the UK 38% of firms are failing to address desktop backup and laptop backup. Considering a large portion of live “work in progress” data is stored on end user machines this is leaving UK SME’s unnecessarily vulnerable to data loss.

The event also highlighted an industry shift towards “online backup or cloud backup” which is Redstor’s main focus and in particular emphasis on the ability to recover to alternative hardware if the need arises.
The real question for businesses operating in the knowledge economy today is what price can really be put on the safety and security of your data?
Redstor has been addressing these backup and storage issues since 1998 with Redstor Protector, Online Backup and Schools’ Backup as well as enterprise storage solutions and managed storage services for EMC and other recognised industry players.

Redstor at the Reading Expo - Madejski Stadium

Redstor exhibited at the Reading Expo hosted at Reading Football Club's Madejski Stadium earlier this week which was attended by a number of delegates from various local businesses and organisations. We showcased our knowledge around solving organisation’s storage and backup challenges and key cloud services as well as protecting sensitive data and remotely managing devices. The event was a good opportunity for us to interact with local businesses from big to small and further established our name and increased our awareness within the local area.

We are keen to continue with attending and supporting local exhibitions and will look to speak at such local events in the future.

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Redstor have been focused on data management and protection since 1998 and have created one of the largest service provider enabled storage infrastructures (storage clouds) in the UK. Redstor Online Backup is re-branded by numerous well known service organisations and is the engine behind the Redstor Backup Service for Schools (RBUSS). Over 80 Local Authorities and education service providers use Redstor's online service to backup and restore the data of over 12,000 addressable schools in the UK.