Case Study

The NSPCC is a leading charity, which specialises in the protection and prevention of cruelty to children. The charity helps more than 10,000 children and their families each year as well as providing a free 24 hour helpline, public education campaigns, parliamentary campaigns, training, research and fundraising.

This leading charity wanted a disaster recovery solution that would offer the ultimate service with the best value for money.

Critical Data
The NSPCC employs 1,800 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, working within 180 community-based teams and projects. There are thousands of transactions on the IT system each day, with reports and statistics being produced each night. The NSPCC’s head office in London holds all information on a central database that is recorded about children each day. Although the information was previously backed up and sent daily to a local disaster recovery service, the NSPCC needed to ensure that in the event of a power failure or disaster situation that affected an entire area, that its data would be protected. Data held in the NSPCC’s database amounts to hundreds of thousands of children’s details and it was vital to ensure that this key information was not compromised.

The Solution

The NSPCC needed a fast, reliable, convenient and good value recovery solution that could be conducted from a different location to ensure that if a local disaster occurred its information would not be lost and its staff could continue to offer its vital service to the public. Life IT recommended *noMAX, which would enable the NSPCC to bring its disaster recovery solution “in-house” under its own control. It became evident that *noMAX was the most efficient and cost effective solution for the charity. *noMAX provides up to the second data transfer with none of the delays associated with making tape copies of the system and then having to transport them to a secure site. All the NSPCC’s data is now replicated immediately to a system in the Manchester office, removing any issues of delay or downtime.

Traditional disaster recovery services, although effective for some companies, can offer varying levels of service according to company budgets. Being a charity, the NSPCC wanted the top level service to secure its data, but could not justify the large budget required to achieve this using an outsourced service.

Business Benefits
*noMAX was a logical solution to our problem,” said Dan Hall, technical services manager for the NSPCC. “It was easy to install and offers additional functionality by being online immediately, effectively giving us a back up every second and increasing our return on investment.” *noMAX provides the NSPCC with real-time replication and unique continuous integrity checking. The cost of implementing *noMAX compared with the cost of the NSPCC’s existing disaster recovery service was justified by looking at the long-term cost of both solutions. The NSPCC will see a return on their
investment in *noMax within one year. On going costs are a fraction of the cost of their previous service, which will amount to savings of tens of thousands of pounds over several years.

Highlights
	Low cost solution
	Quick and easy implementation
	Real-time replication
	Can be implemented with limited network bandwidth
	ROI within one year