Case Study: West Midlands Fire Service achieves rapid, tape-free backups and 360 staff-hours saved with Cohesity

Cohesity Helps Extinguish Legacy Backup and Recovery Issues

West Midlands Fire Service, the UK’s second-largest metropolitan fire brigade serving 2.8 million people, faced ageing backup infrastructure, tight public-sector budgets, and onerous long-term retention and GDPR requirements. Legacy tape-based processes were slow, error-prone and labour-intensive, forcing staff to manually manage off-site backups and creating unacceptable risk to mission‑critical response data and recovery SLAs.

The service deployed Cohesity (integrating with its Nutanix AHV environment) to replace tape and legacy systems, gaining hyperconverged, immutable backups with automated global indexing and rapid file-level restores. Backups that once took hours now complete in minutes, saving about 360 staff-hours per year, enabling hourly protection of critical data, eliminating tape handling, reducing storage via deduplication, and significantly improving recovery speed and operational efficiency.

West Midlands Fire Service

Adrian Scoyne

Principal Infrastructure Engineer