Steve Mason, IT manager at Career Moves, was tasked with replacing the legacy system when he joined the company in 2007. He said: Our server systems were about three years old and were reaching their capacity with space and performance, which was significantly holding us back in being able to expand the business and cater for the growth. The systems did not have redundant power supplies or network cards, leaving us open to downtime should a server failure occur.
The new servers and online backup and recovery system went live across the company in July 2007, after a two week implementation period. With the old system, Career Moves experienced two hours per week of downtime due to issues such as rebooting, slow server speeds and file corruptions.
Mason says that oncore IT’s fully outsourced IT service has resulted in significant financial savings for the company. We have calculated that the new system is saving the company £4,000 a week in reclaimed working hours. Oncore IT carried out an annual DR test last month, which involved restoring all of our servers and data as if in a data loss emergency and staging a workplace recovery test, which all ran quickly and smoothly with no data losses. This is very important to us, as we store 40,000 job applications on our systems, which is highly critical data for our business, he said.
Data backup will be provided via oncore IT’s Online Backup (OLB) System. Powered by Asigra, the system offers a fully automated and 64-bit encrypted daily backup service for all electronic data, including emails, financial information and a database of 40,000 applicants, 5,000 clients and 20,000 contacts.
Mason says that the oncore IT data centre contains replacement servers, which are on permanent standby to deploy in the event of a disaster. All the latest company data is automatically loaded onto the replacement servers, ready for us to connect to the new server remotely, in a seamless transition to allow for business to continue as usual. For further security, should the main oncore IT data centre fail, it has a second data centre in Paris that would automatically take over, he said.
Although Career Moves did not experience any major data losses with its old system, Mason says it did suffer from, Time-consuming minor data losses and server failures as a result of the legacy tape-based backup system, which did not check that data could be retrieved in a data loss situation.
The legacy system would often take up to 20 minutes to retrieve data, if retrieval was possible. The new system takes about five minutes to restore data, Mason says. The biggest difference is in the retrieval of the data; it’s all about the restore, not the backup. Data was often corrupt or the tapes were broken when trying to retrieve lost files before, so the data would be lost permanently. We have not permanently lost a single item of data since oncore IT’s implementation, he said.
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Oncore IT also implemented its antivirus and anti spam email service at Career Moves. The company says its service provides the industry’s highest accuracy in filtering, with 0% of emails falsely identified as spam.
The outsourced IT system will be supported by oncore IT’s PReSS (Proactive Remote Engineering Support Service) IT network management system. The systems aims to provide continuous and proactive system monitoring, fault identification, alerting and resolution services.
