03 January 2018

Set within a 700-acre estate in the Surrey Hills, Woldingham School is a Catholic boarding and day school for girls aged 11 to 18, and was founded in 1842 by the Society of the Sacred Heart.

Its 200-acre main site is comprised of a mix of traditional and modern buildings for teaching, accommodation for more than 350 pupils, and more than 50 houses and flats for teaching and support staff. An IT team of four manage a complex network with high demand to support the teaching and learning, the school’s business elements, and the social use of ICT.

One of the issues Woldingham faced was to ensure that all data stored across the network was backed up and easily available should anything go wrong. It was utilising a hybrid solution to backup both physical and virtual servers which meant that once the data had been backed up to a storage array, a copy of that data would then be transferred to tape. 

But the significant increase in student and staff data challenged the scalability of this solution. The school also found that because it was using separate providers for the virtual and physical backup, there was no single point of contact for support. This was growing into an increasing problem as the backup system was creating issues on a daily basis.

Having looked at a number of solutions, the IT team were shown a demo of the Redstor Backup for Schools Service (RBUSS) and found it satisfied all their requirements. The solution was rolled out in August 2015, and it’s claimed the implementation was smooth with no downtime due to the school overlapping their old backup system with RBUSS.

Woldingham is now successfully backing up more than 4TB of student and staff data and Redstor says RBUSS addresses the challenge of coping with data growth as it can scale without any additional hardware or software requirements.

The company adds that the system guarantees security by ensuring data are encrypted at source, in transit and at rest in its data centres using either 128-bit AES, 256-bit AES or 448-bit Blowfish security. It says the system is also ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified which allows organisations to comply with the legislation and guidelines outlined by Ofsted, the Data Protection Act and the Information Commissioner’s Office.