BUSINESS A historic professional legal society The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple is one of four Inns of Court with the exclusive right to call students to the Bar in England and Wales. Its long and distinguished history began with its founding in 1608 with the objective of providing education and offices for those practising or training in the field of law. Its core values are to promote diversity and access to the Bar by means of financial support to students, to maintain the Inn’s historic heritage and to provide professional accommodation and facilities to barristers, to achieve a high standard of advocacy in support of the rule of law and to promote the ethos of the Bar and maintain high professional standards in the public interest.
CHALLENGE Simplifying data protection Middle Temple is committed to providing its members, clients, staff and tenants with the best possible service. The backbone of smooth operations for any organisation is protecting business-critical data and assuring the integrity and continuity of core IT systems and applications. The society was reliant on its managed services provider to deliver an offsite disaster recovery solution, however, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and Middle Temple lacked control over its data. Planned disaster recovery simulations could take several weeks to schedule, leaving the society at risk in the interim. But the more pressing concern was caused by the shared datacentre environment. The data was stored in a shared space with backups from other organisations, but due to data protection legislation, only the service provider itself had direct access to the data.
SOLUTION Automated backup and replication In spring of 2015, Middle Temple turned to a new managed service provider, Core DataCloud, and a new data protection solution – Arcserve UDP. Arcserve UDP is central to Core DataCloud’s Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Data Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions. The Arcserve solution backs up all data from Middle Temple’s head office to an onsite recovery point server. Data is then replicated to a virtual environment in Core DataCloud’s Tier-III datacentre in the UK. The Arcserve solution performs an automated and fully encrypted backup for critical data at intervals set to suit the business requirement of each server. This multi-tiered approach eliminates any single point of failure and offers the society a variety of options when it comes to restoring data. Files and folders can now be recovered immediately without having to log a request and wait for someone to become available. In the event of an incident that prevents recovery from Middle Temple’s onsite backup, the organisation can simply failover to the standby environment in Core DataCloud’s UK datacentre, resulting in minimal disruption to business services.
