Case Study: Surrey County Council achieves rapid recovery and major cost savings with Arcserve

County council safeguards critical public services and reduces costs with Arcserve

Surrey County Council, a local government authority serving one million residents with 23,000 employees, needed to modernise backup and recovery as part of a shared IT partnership (Orbis) and a new datacentre. Its legacy solutions were costly, hard to scale and risked unacceptable downtime—restoring all services after a major incident was estimated at 450 person-days—so the council sought a more reliable, efficient way to protect critical services like social care, emergency mobilisation and pensions.

The council deployed two Arcserve appliances (one at production, one at DR) to protect more than 220 TB of mixed workloads, with backups replicated to the DR site and snapshots for continuous protection. The solution automated 90% of processes, achieved 80% data compression, cut restore time to under an hour (from two days), and enables major-incident recovery in hours rather than hundreds of person-days; the upgrade is also expected to save £1.3m in licensing and deliver ROI within five years.

Surrey County Council

Paul Clarke

Critical Facilities Team Leader