Kent Police Nabs Acronis For Faster, Easier And More Efficient Backups

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, 27 November, 2012 - London, UK - Acronis®, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, has been selected by Kent Police to supply a fast, flexible and efficient disaster recovery and data protection system to protect more than 500TB of data created, stored and used by its 6,000 employees.

Kent Police had previously relied on multiple backup and recovery platforms to protect data across a heterogeneous mix of more than 500 physical and virtual Windows®, Linux and VMware® servers. Andy Barker, IT director at Kent Police, said: "Regular bomb threats, protests, cyber attacks and viruses are just some of the reasons why we needed a more robust but easier to manage backup and recovery plan. With ready access to data a critical requirement throughout the Force, we also had to drastically cut previously slow recovery times."

After extensive evaluation, Kent Police found that only Acronis Backup & Recovery® 11 Advanced Server could fully address its heterogeneous, physical and virtual server needs within a single platform. Acronis Backup & Recovery is a unified solution for data and application databases backup, it dramatically reduces the management burden of procuring, learning and integrating additional products as networks evolve, thereby reducing time and cost with one solution that can be managed across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Kent Police purchased 140 Acronis Backup & Recovery physical server licences as well as 25 virtual edition licences to back up the virtual machine hosts and the VMs on them. It has also opted to use data de-duplication technology embedded within Acronis Backup & Recovery to shrink backups by up to 80 percent. Not only does this save space needed for backups, initial testing indicates that recovering data, a task that used to take up to three days with the previous solution, can now be accomplished within the hour. Kent Police estimates that de-duplication alone will save at least £13,000 annually in storage costs.

Granularity of recovery was another high priority for Barker's team. The catalogue and search capabilities in Acronis Backup & Recovery give Kent Police granular restore access, so a corrupted, deleted or lost file can be recovered individually. The IT team can drill down to file level, pick out the necessary file and recover it, usually in a matter of minutes. With its migration capabilities, the team also plans to use ABR whenever a system needs to be upgraded. By taking a full image of the system prior to any upgrade so that, if the upgrade goes wrong for any reason, the IT department can simply rollback the server to its original healthy state.

Barker says that, following the deployment at Kent Police; he also expects to roll out Acronis Backup & Recovery at the Essex Police force. He explains: "This is part of a wider strategy to form a combined IT department, pool resources for greater efficiency and cut IT costs for both police forces even further."

Alan Laing, Vice President EMEA, Acronis, concludes: "Like more organisations today, Kent Police, is faced with growing volumes of data but tightening budgets which is introducing new challenges. As a result, it needed an uncomplicated and flexible solution for its data protection and storage optimisation. Acronis Backup & Recovery is a single solution that works across every environment, giving the team at Kent the confidence that whatever network development they may face easy access and availability of their protected data, no matter where it resides, is achievable."