Providing ICT support for schools and finding new relevant services can be a huge challenge.
You are expected to do more, better, with less!
With the impending funding crisis (the Government’s Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP) recommends savings by 2013/14 of 20% per year on ICT to be made across all Government Bodies), service providers need to prepare themselves to change the way they offer their services and to make service delivery as efficient as they possibly can.
In order to stimulate some debate and provide some business transformation ideas, Redstor in partnership with CentraStage has produced a Whitepaper “New and Proactive Services for Schools”.
For more information, please click HERE
Friday, 4 December 2009
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Secondary schools fail off-site backup test
Many secondary schools are failing to heed rules on information storage set out by government agency Becta by not keeping off site backups of their data.
Read more on this key topic by visiting http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2253961/secondary-schools-fail-site
Secondary schools can address this challenge by using Redstor's online backup service for schools - http://www.redstor.com/backupforschools.html
Redstor's online backup service is used by over 75 Local Authorities and service providers in the Education Sector throughout the United Kingdom addressing the backups of over 12,000 schools. The software that powers the service is Capita’s approved backup technology for SIMS, however it also protects every other MIS application in use amongst UK schools.
Read more on this key topic by visiting http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2253961/secondary-schools-fail-site
Secondary schools can address this challenge by using Redstor's online backup service for schools - http://www.redstor.com/backupforschools.html
Redstor's online backup service is used by over 75 Local Authorities and service providers in the Education Sector throughout the United Kingdom addressing the backups of over 12,000 schools. The software that powers the service is Capita’s approved backup technology for SIMS, however it also protects every other MIS application in use amongst UK schools.
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
The Sun Reveals EastEnders Scripts for the Christmas Day Specials have been stolen....
Redstor Protector has been designed to keep you out of the headlines!
http://www.thesun.co.uk/search/searchAction.do?query=eastenders+script+stolen&vew=internal&pubName=sol and http://gvaonline.co.uk/?p=593
With Redstor Protector you can do a windows backup of your data, which will be fully encrypted and sent to the Redstor data centre. In the event of theft or loss you can send a remote shred command to your laptop so that none of your confidential stuff is revealed.
http://www.redstor.com/protector.html
http://www.thesun.co.uk/search/searchAction.do?query=eastenders+script+stolen&vew=internal&pubName=sol and http://gvaonline.co.uk/?p=593
With Redstor Protector you can do a windows backup of your data, which will be fully encrypted and sent to the Redstor data centre. In the event of theft or loss you can send a remote shred command to your laptop so that none of your confidential stuff is revealed.
http://www.redstor.com/protector.html
Friday, 20 November 2009
SUN works with UK’s leading private Online Backup Provider
Since 1998 Redstor has been providing innovative backup and storage solutions to wide ranging organisations from large oil and gas and financial companies to hi-tech and public sector organisations such as local authorities.
4 ½ years ago based on this experience we created our own online backup service and ever since we have been at the forefront of cloud storage and backups and we are now supporting many thousands of organisations including over 12,000 schools.
In our quest to keep improving our service, and driving operational efficiencies in our storage platform we are always evaluating new technologies to see if they would benefit our customers and recently we have started working with SUN Open Storage and have been impressed with what we have seen. Below is an excerpt from the Sun Story.
U.K. Provider of Private Cloud Backups Cuts TCO for Storage Platform by 50% with Sun Open Storage. Founded in the United Kingdom in 1998, Redstor is a managed services and IT solutions company focused on storage, data management, and protection. In 2005, it launched the private cloud Redstor Online Backup service, which today has more than 200 TB of customer data under its protection............ For more on this story please click on the link:
http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/redstor.xml
4 ½ years ago based on this experience we created our own online backup service and ever since we have been at the forefront of cloud storage and backups and we are now supporting many thousands of organisations including over 12,000 schools.
In our quest to keep improving our service, and driving operational efficiencies in our storage platform we are always evaluating new technologies to see if they would benefit our customers and recently we have started working with SUN Open Storage and have been impressed with what we have seen. Below is an excerpt from the Sun Story.
U.K. Provider of Private Cloud Backups Cuts TCO for Storage Platform by 50% with Sun Open Storage. Founded in the United Kingdom in 1998, Redstor is a managed services and IT solutions company focused on storage, data management, and protection. In 2005, it launched the private cloud Redstor Online Backup service, which today has more than 200 TB of customer data under its protection............ For more on this story please click on the link:
http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/redstor.xml
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Dominic Anschutz-Redstor's New Operations Manager
We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dominic Anschutz to the role of Operations Manager.
Dominic has an Honours Degree in Engineering from University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and then began his career in 1994 at Citigroup in London, England as an independent IT consultant. Since then his career has taken him across the world, working in Verizon (MCI), Barclays Bank and City of London Telecommunications. In 1998 he co-founded Turing Service Management seeking to deliver quality consultancy in the BMC Remedy market place. Under his guidance Turing became synonymous with quality consultancy within the BMC industry.Dominic has held a series of leadership positions during his career at TuringSMI and played a key role in creating the Global Managed Services Division. Rising to CEO, he built one of the largest Global BMC services organizations in the industry. Since then, Dominic’s leadership and passion for the Managed services have become hallmarks of his tenure at the company. In 2007 he did an MBO of the recruitment division and started Resource Management Solutions a specialist recruitment firm with a radically new way of doing Technology placements based on product verticals. In 2009 Dominic merged RMS with ETICA and managed the strategy for SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, BMC and RFID resource management portals.
Dominic comes with a wealth of experience in dealing with the challenges of growing businesses especially in the managed services arena. Dominic has been brought on board as part of the management team to help lead the Redstor push into more Managed Services and continue to build the Redstor Online Backup and Storage Platform. In particular, to ensure that we continue to maintain and enhance our customer experience as we go through the next phase of Redstor’s growth.
Paul Evans
Dominic has an Honours Degree in Engineering from University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and then began his career in 1994 at Citigroup in London, England as an independent IT consultant. Since then his career has taken him across the world, working in Verizon (MCI), Barclays Bank and City of London Telecommunications. In 1998 he co-founded Turing Service Management seeking to deliver quality consultancy in the BMC Remedy market place. Under his guidance Turing became synonymous with quality consultancy within the BMC industry.Dominic has held a series of leadership positions during his career at TuringSMI and played a key role in creating the Global Managed Services Division. Rising to CEO, he built one of the largest Global BMC services organizations in the industry. Since then, Dominic’s leadership and passion for the Managed services have become hallmarks of his tenure at the company. In 2007 he did an MBO of the recruitment division and started Resource Management Solutions a specialist recruitment firm with a radically new way of doing Technology placements based on product verticals. In 2009 Dominic merged RMS with ETICA and managed the strategy for SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, BMC and RFID resource management portals.
Dominic comes with a wealth of experience in dealing with the challenges of growing businesses especially in the managed services arena. Dominic has been brought on board as part of the management team to help lead the Redstor push into more Managed Services and continue to build the Redstor Online Backup and Storage Platform. In particular, to ensure that we continue to maintain and enhance our customer experience as we go through the next phase of Redstor’s growth.
Paul Evans
Redstor's Online Backup Service for Schools Addressing BECTA's guidelines
With the ever growing issues concerning security of school data, Redstor's online backup service for schools addresses these issues by providing secure and encrypted off-site backups of valuable school data.
More importantly, the service complies with BECTA's 2009 guidelines for data encryption and keeping data secure, safe and legal.
To learn more about these guidelines, please visit:
Redstor's online backup service is used by over 75 Local Authorities and service providers in the Education Sector throughout the United Kingdom addressing the backups of over 12,000 schools. The software that powers the service is Capita’s approved backup technology for SIMS, however it also protects every other MIS application in use amongst UK schools. RBUSS is protecting school data across a broad mix of Local Authorities in the UK, regardless of size, demographics, location, numbers of school and size of school. Admin and Curriculum bundles are available in differing Gb sized accounts. www.redstor.com/backupforschools.html
More importantly, the service complies with BECTA's 2009 guidelines for data encryption and keeping data secure, safe and legal.
To learn more about these guidelines, please visit:
- http://schools.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/data_encryption.pdf
- http://schools.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/information_handling.pdf
Redstor's online backup service is used by over 75 Local Authorities and service providers in the Education Sector throughout the United Kingdom addressing the backups of over 12,000 schools. The software that powers the service is Capita’s approved backup technology for SIMS, however it also protects every other MIS application in use amongst UK schools. RBUSS is protecting school data across a broad mix of Local Authorities in the UK, regardless of size, demographics, location, numbers of school and size of school. Admin and Curriculum bundles are available in differing Gb sized accounts. www.redstor.com/backupforschools.html
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Redstor's New General Manager
I am delighted to announce that Chris Sigley has been appointed as the General Manager of Redstor with full profit and loss responsibilities.
Chris has been successfully heading up the Redstor Education Business Unit which has grown significantly in the last 4 years. This unit now has over 70 Local Authority and Service Partners as customers built initially around Redstor’s Backup Service for Schools (RBUSS) which backs up over 12,000 schools in the UK. Chris was also behind the introduction of Centrastage a device management software which enables Local Authorities to do Asset Management, Power Management, Software Distribution and Remote Support from one web console to their schools.
Chris originally joined the company in September 2004 and has progressed rapidly from being a new business executive, to Education Head to General Manager.
Since Redstor was founded in 1998 by Tony Ruane and myself it has been focused in the area of Data Management and Protection and over the years we have built up a solid and loyal customer base with many recurring relationships and today over 60% of Redstor's income is repeatable which gives us a springboard for continued growth.
Chris's challenge is to continue to renew and grow our customer relationships which we value through excellent customer service and delivering innovative solutions in line with Redstor's heritage.
Paul Evans, MD
Chris has been successfully heading up the Redstor Education Business Unit which has grown significantly in the last 4 years. This unit now has over 70 Local Authority and Service Partners as customers built initially around Redstor’s Backup Service for Schools (RBUSS) which backs up over 12,000 schools in the UK. Chris was also behind the introduction of Centrastage a device management software which enables Local Authorities to do Asset Management, Power Management, Software Distribution and Remote Support from one web console to their schools.
Chris originally joined the company in September 2004 and has progressed rapidly from being a new business executive, to Education Head to General Manager.
Since Redstor was founded in 1998 by Tony Ruane and myself it has been focused in the area of Data Management and Protection and over the years we have built up a solid and loyal customer base with many recurring relationships and today over 60% of Redstor's income is repeatable which gives us a springboard for continued growth.
Chris's challenge is to continue to renew and grow our customer relationships which we value through excellent customer service and delivering innovative solutions in line with Redstor's heritage.
Paul Evans, MD
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Redstor on hand to empower a large UK energy organisation
We have recently successfully completed a long term consultancy project at a large organisation operating in the UK energy market. Redstor were employed to join the customers Storage Team and to develop and document its ‘storage strategy’, including the strategic objective, long-term vision and roadmap, a strategy that would be followed through this year and next and would re-shape the storage environment and provide a stable platform from which to support the business.
The large, multi-vendor, heterogeneous infrastructure had grown up largely in support of point solutions, specific project, departmental or inter-company initiatives and consisted of in excess of a thousand servers, two large isolated Storage Area Networks hosting multiple storage systems, a mix of backup and recovery applications and tape libraries with differing tape technologies. With approximately 240Tb's worth of data, the environment was difficult to manage, it was managed in ‘silos’, spread across several support teams with no common processes or tools. The aim was to create a consolidated environment that was scalable and could realise efficiencies through economies of scale, eliminating redundant hardware and software costs and streamlining administrative effort.
Redstor were able to call upon a variety of technology partners, reinforcing our stance of having a best-of-breed and independent approach. Some of these partners included Symantec, IBM, HP, NetApp, SUN and Brocade.
Considering the history of the current infrastructure, the limitations of the existing designs and the requirements for further growth, the strategy was split into four themes consisting of consolidated backup and recovery, disk storage consolidation, consolidation of file services and the development of the existing Storage Area Networks. The process of developing the strategy involved the customer outlining a direction that we challenged and shaped, using our many years of experience working with thousands of organizations, large and small, in different markets and using our understanding of technology, what works, what doesn’t and through a series of interactive, face-to-face sessions.
The consultancy was completed on time and has resulted in a well received, documented strategy, a ‘blueprint’, that articulates and controls what the future enterprise storage infrastructure environment will look like and will aid transition planning from the current ‘as-is’ environment to the new ‘to-be’ environment.
The large, multi-vendor, heterogeneous infrastructure had grown up largely in support of point solutions, specific project, departmental or inter-company initiatives and consisted of in excess of a thousand servers, two large isolated Storage Area Networks hosting multiple storage systems, a mix of backup and recovery applications and tape libraries with differing tape technologies. With approximately 240Tb's worth of data, the environment was difficult to manage, it was managed in ‘silos’, spread across several support teams with no common processes or tools. The aim was to create a consolidated environment that was scalable and could realise efficiencies through economies of scale, eliminating redundant hardware and software costs and streamlining administrative effort.
Redstor were able to call upon a variety of technology partners, reinforcing our stance of having a best-of-breed and independent approach. Some of these partners included Symantec, IBM, HP, NetApp, SUN and Brocade.
Considering the history of the current infrastructure, the limitations of the existing designs and the requirements for further growth, the strategy was split into four themes consisting of consolidated backup and recovery, disk storage consolidation, consolidation of file services and the development of the existing Storage Area Networks. The process of developing the strategy involved the customer outlining a direction that we challenged and shaped, using our many years of experience working with thousands of organizations, large and small, in different markets and using our understanding of technology, what works, what doesn’t and through a series of interactive, face-to-face sessions.
The consultancy was completed on time and has resulted in a well received, documented strategy, a ‘blueprint’, that articulates and controls what the future enterprise storage infrastructure environment will look like and will aid transition planning from the current ‘as-is’ environment to the new ‘to-be’ environment.
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