Essex County Fire and Rescue Service Opts for Backup Technology

Backup Technology Ltd (BTL), part of cloud company iomart Group plc and specialized in online backup and DR services for enterprises, is helping Essex County Fire & Rescue Service (ECFRS) safeguard the data it generates as it protects local people and property.

ECFRS is one of the largest county fire services in the UK, protecting a population of more than 1.74 million. Its firefighters attend over 24,000 emergency incidents every year. After its existing backup solution became too difficult to manage, it chose BTL via the UK Government’s Digital Marketplace for G-Cloud services, to provide an improved managed service.

Jan Swanwick, head of ICT, ECFRS, explained: “Traditionally procurement has been a long, protracted process. With G-Cloud it is very straightforward because all the supplier and product information has already been collated and validated.“

BTL protects more than 22TB of data for fire service using a public cloud backup solution from Asigra Inc.

Paul Hill, assistant chief fire officer for Safer Communities, said: “Saving lives isn’t just about putting out fires and attending emergencies, it is about using the data we collect during our work to protect the people and property of our county. We spend a huge amount of time analysing the data we collect so that we can target our services in the correct and most efficient way. Knowing that this data is protected by Backup Technology is vital to the success of everything we do.“

Rob Mackle, sales and service manager, BTL, said: “The fully managed solution encompasses every aspect of the backup contract from configuration and installation through to the daily monitoring and restoration support of the backups.“

Eran Farajun, EVP, Asigra, said: “Essex County Fire & Rescue’s mission critical operation is a perfect example where data availability can have a real impact on an organisation’s QoS. BTL understands this and relies on our award-winning data recovery software to provide customers with best-of-breed backup services. This recent deployment highlights the continued momentum of cloud-based data recovery throughout the region.”

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