Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Case Study
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Case Study
Key Drivers
■ Limitations on server capacity. ■ Constraints to learning
approaches.
■ Limitations of buildings. ■ Data security risks.
■ Having a single point of failure
for security attacks.
Intended Beneficiaries
Learners at all college centres including remote ones and learners at international locations. Prospective Learners.
Staff. Employers. Partners.
All users of college IT systems.
Colleges and Projects
Joseph Chamberlain College JCC Silver Lining
(part of a wider project)
South Devon College Cloud Access and Backup
(part of a wider project)
South Tyneside College Offsite Resilience via Cloud Computing
Walsall College Cloud Storage Solution
Summary
These projects are concerned with back up in the Cloud of the whole or part of a college’s data. Solutions used included Microsoft Azure, Amazon Glacier, Crash Plan and Redstor. Veeam Cloud has been used for a private cloud.One project includes integration between public and private Cloud Solutions to maximise resilience. Another was confined to back up of data used at remote sites
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Case Study
Impact to date and anticipated
The main impact of these projects is having robust disaster recovery arrangements in place which relate directly to maintaining business critical college activities. As colleges expand into areas such as academies, UTC and international learning the need for robust DR becomes increasingly critical. These projects have raised an understanding of risk.
Joseph Chamberlain College: “Online backup is working very well. It removes the “techie” aspect that is often associated with managing an in house backup solution that can consist of a number of technical components”.
South Tyneside College: “South Tyneside’s key challenge is that 1/3 of our turnover is derived from learners in the Marine Industry located in 73 countries. This added to the disaster recovery requirements in requiring 24/7 support. The campus front end server is replicated in the Cloud”.
Walsall College: “Walsall College already had an established disaster recovery / business continuity process that utilised two well-connected campuses. Walsall College also provided backup and hosting for a local all through academy and a University Technical College. The key challenges
facing our current DR solution was the fact that the campuses were only a mile apart and long term archiving was proving difficult due to storage requirements.
Walsall College has integrated public and personal cloud solutions to significantly increase the resilience of our disaster recovery plan. We are developing a seamless integration between our on-site private cloud and public cloud solutions to reduce server infrastructure replacement cost while maintaining excellent service uptime. We have significantly improved the IT services department’s understanding of public cloud solutions and have enhanced the college’s business continuity plan with the use of cloud solutions”.
Supplier engagement experiences
The main issues encountered were cost effectiveness including bandwidth costs, the knowledge of supplier representatives, supplier capability to deliver 24/7 services, the ability of a supplier to contract with the college in reasonable timescales and the location of the supplier’s data centre.
Joseph Chamberlain College: “The move to cloud based backup was managed well by our partner and Redstor and the switch was simple and straightforward. “
South Devon College: “We used long standing contacts with years of IT experience to recommend cloud service suppliers and having met several, the decision and implementation was very simple. Contacting them to report issues has been simple”.
South Tyneside College: “Selecting suppliers was relatively straight-t forward; however, signing up to their service was traumatic. This was largely due to large scale suppliers not understanding the FE Sector”.
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Case Study
Walsall College: ”We tried a large variety of different cloud providers and software solutions to archive Walsall College’s data in the cloud. We also experienced large scale suppliers not understanding the FE Sector. We settled on Amazon Glacier and have recently completed a full upload of all important data to the cloud. Evaluation included price/GB and took into account band with costs.
Technical and Security Challenges
The main issues here are turn-around times and encryption considerations, in particular the value of a college encrypting its own data before it is transferred to the Cloud. This should allay the fears of many colleges about the security of data in the Cloud.
South Tyneside College: “Establishing a VPN connection between ourselves and the cloud provider, mainly caused by having to figure out the appropriate settings required by our firewall/router to interface correctly with their systems”.
Walsall College: ”We required all our data to be encrypted by Walsall College before it was transferred across to the cloud provider. Dependent on data security requirements the data is encrypted with a 128 - 448-bit data key before transfer and remains encrypted at the data centre until recovery is requested. The data centre is compliant with ISO 27001 and BS 25999. This maintains the College’s ownership of the data as it can only be read with knowledge of these encryption keys. We tested several software solutions before settling on one that fulfilled these criteria. An important factor in the supplier decision is the location of the data centre, which should be kept in the EU for legal/access reasons. Walsall’s data on Amazon Glacier are held in Ireland”
Change Management experience
The predominant theme here is that change management in Disaster Recovery Projects is limited in the main to technical staff.
South Tyneside College: “Most of the changes have been related to internal IT processes therefore have had limited impact and only affected IT staff”
Walsall College: “Change management was limited in this project as we had no current long term archive solution. The changes are transparent to the student but have allowed us to go back further with our archiving and data recovery should the student lose data.”
Return on Investment
Whilst robust disaster recovery arrangements are the over-riding goal, these colleges are demonstrating that moving disaster recovery from an in-house solution to one delivered as a utility is being achieved with significant cost savings.
Joseph Chamberlain College; “Moving to a cloud based backup solution has resulted in time and cost savings in man hours. An improvement in service and a quicker turnaround for data restores than our legacy backup system”.
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Case Study
South Thameside College: “Savings of approximately £40K compared to the replacement of existing DR facilities”
Walsall College:” Future costs savings have been estimated at around £20k. On the last occasion we refreshed our on-site backup solution we spent approximately £24,000 Hardware + £6500 Software. With the requirement to increase the amount of time we store backup data we expected this cost to increase at the next refresh. Our testing and implementation shows Walsall College could save approx. £20,000 on our next backup refresh by keeping the on-site storage to a minimum and extend our existing refresh cycle by at least one academic year”.
Walsall College: “This project has given us the option to release expensive and required on site storage to be better utilised for other more business critical solution”.
Lessons Learned
Joseph Chamberlain College: “Expect the unexpected, and the easiest and simple tasks are often the most complex. e.g., our local xserve backup is currently indicating it will take 19 days to complete its local backup!”.
South Tyneside College:” Allow more time to sign up for contracts!”
Walsall College : “The cloud market and associated pricing structures are changing quickly , this makes it difficult to assess long term costs”
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With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the development of this case study and consultant Chris West
