Case Study: North Devon Council achieves fast, automated data recovery and lower disaster‑recovery costs with Arcserve

North Devon Council Safeguards Services with fast and efficient Data Recovery

North Devon Council, a small rural district authority serving about 90,000 residents, faced growing IT risk after virtualising 75% of its datacentre. Its services — from planning and waste collection to electoral and housing systems — depended on fast access to data, but traditional tape backups were slow, labor‑intensive and made restores take hours; the council also relied on a costly third‑party disaster recovery contract. It needed a cost‑effective, automated backup and replication solution to protect a hybrid physical/virtual environment and maintain service continuity.

The council deployed Arcserve Backup, D2D, Replication and High Availability on a capacity licence to protect roughly 70 servers. Automation simplified offsite replication, eliminated the third‑party DR contract and cut individual file restores from over an hour to minutes, with high‑priority systems recoverable immediately. The result was lower costs, continuous access to information and stronger resilience for critical public services, including the council website.

North Devon Council

Paul Shears

Senior Technical Analyst, ICT