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UK School Shifts to Cloud for Disaster Recovery

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/06/13

A private school in England has shifted its backup to a cloud-based service and expects to move all of its operations online within five years. Clifton College in Bristol chose NaviSite's European division to supply disaster recovery services. The school, which has 1,300 students and 500 staff, chose the vendor through a competitive bid process that included a visit to the company's operations in Woking, a city outside of London and about two hours away from Bristol. NaviSite provides cloud and hosting services as well as managed applications.

Clifton College already has two on-site data centers; the latest decision will provide an off-site mechanism for recovering critical business functions in the event that the campus suffers a physical disaster.

"Clifton College is one of the top performing schools in the country, so parents and pupils expect to receive a quality service at all times, and maintaining the availability of our core business functions is critical. Moving to the cloud made a lot of sense as previously it might have taken up to three days to get the systems back online in the event of a disaster like a fire or flood, but the NaviSite disaster recovery solution allows us to get back up and running in no time at all," said Network Manager Richard Edwards.

The field trip persuaded Edwards and his colleagues that the company's staff were "friendly, very helpful, and efficient; they made it easy for us to implement the solution. They offered us excellent technical support at every step of the way making this daunting project seamless."

Eventually, the school expects to move its business processes for accounting, human resources, and facilities management online as well.