SUMMARY
CLIENT
The William Henry Smith School work with children and young people aged 5-19 across a broad spectrum of social, emotional and mental health challenges.
PROJECT
The William Henry Smith School had growing concerns over their IT systems and needed to ensure that their data was completely backed up, especially since they collect sensitive data.
SOLUTION
We proposed the idea of centralised Physical Servers. By centralising the infrastructure on Hyper V environmental it allowed us to introduce Hyper V Replications and introducing onsite and offsite backups.
Introduction
With history dating back to 1916, The William Henry Smith School work with children and young people aged 5-19 across a broad spectrum of social, emotional and mental health challenges. With their years of knowledge and expertise, they are a school which is committed to providing excellent support to their students. Ofsted has recognised their experience by awarding them an 'Outstanding' rating across all areas of the school, and they have been Ofsted Social Care Outstanding for 16 consecutive years. They not only support their school community, but also numerous charities by hosting a variety of events to benefit organisations such as The Salvation Army, McMillan, and Jeans for Genes.
Challenge
The William Henry Smith School had growing concerns over their IT systems and needed to ensure that their data was completely backed up, especially since they collected sensitive information. They also had a lot of outdated systems that were not meeting the expectations of their staff and students.
We conducted a Free IT Health Check, to gain an insight into what aspects were working for them and what needed improving. From the IT Health Check, it was apparent that their IT infrastructure needed to be modernised and improved to help better secure their systems. The current disaster recovery was minimal. This means if a disaster was to occur, it would be very difficult to retrieve their sensitive data. The main challenge was that nothing was centralised and there were multiple servers having the same roles and causing conflict. Having conflicting servers, makes it very difficult to identify the root cause of a problem if the server was to go down. This means they'd have to spend a lot more time determining which server had failed.
Solution
We proposed the idea of centralised Physical Servers. By centralising the infrastructure on Hyper V environmental it allowed us to introduce Hyper V Replications and introducing onsite and offsite backups. Having a centralised server allows for better management and to retrieve and recover data much quicker, reducing downtime.
When introducing this solution, it highlighted a few more areas which were neglected within the infrastructure. This was that all the Servers weren’t monitored for Drive Failure and that a Server had a failed drive, which had remained unnoticed. The previous IT Company didn’t notify The William Henry Smith School on any vulnerabilities on the infrastructure, so the school had thought they were covered.
Another solution we implemented was an updated Firewall. William Henry’s old firewall wasn’t utilising the 1GB bandwidth and was running at 100MB, this has been something William Henry had been using for multiple years without noticing or realising this. By implementing a 1GB Firewall we were able for the school to utilise this bandwidth to its full protentional.
At Edmondson’s IT Services, we take on a very proactive approach to avoid disasters before they happen. Within the IT Health Check, we can find and identify any disasters waiting to happen and propose a solution to ensure your IT is not failing your business. We now manage The William Henry Smith School’s entire IT infrastructure alongside William Henrys Internal IT Department, providing them with IT support to help them better understand their backup solution. They now also know they are going to be looked after if the worst were to happen.
what were the key outcomes?
Improved Data Backup and Security
The implementation of centralised physical services using Hyper V environment addressed the school’s limited disaster recovery, ensuring that the school’s sensitive data is always protected.
Increased Awareness
By working with our team of experts, the school has an increase in awareness about potential IT issues and vulnerabilities.
Proactive IT Support
William Henry Smith School now has proactive IT support by their side to help resolve possible issues before they disrupt the school. We also collaborate closely with their internal IT department to provide comprehensive support.
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