Case Study: EK Services (shared services for three East Kent councils) achieves rapid, reliable disaster recovery — restores services in hours with Arcserve UDP

EK Services safeguards continuity of key council services for Kent citizens with Arcserve UDP

EK Services is a shared‑services partnership created by three East Kent councils to deliver ICT, customer services and revenues & benefits more efficiently. To safeguard continuity of critical public-sector systems (housing, planning, benefits, email and databases) it needed to simplify and standardise disaster recovery across three separate datacentres that were running different backup solutions, suffering long backup windows, storage shortages and a high administrative burden.

EK Services deployed Arcserve UDP 16.5 with a new SAN to provide automated disk‑to‑disk backups, deduplication and replication between the three sites, protecting 130 TB across 250 servers. As a result backups now finish in hours (backup window reduced from ~24 to ~4 hours), recoveries take hours rather than days, administration dropped from a person‑day per week to minutes, and the organisation can reliably restore systems without emergency hardware suppliers, safeguarding council services.

EK Services

Paul Henley

Server Support Manager