Youth charity improves community engagement with Databarracks

The Challenge
Given the huge benefits they deliver to the local communities they work with, LOCsP is run by a relatively small team. IT plays an integral role in enabling the team to maximise their available resources, successfully run large projects and realise their objectives. “Open communication with the communities we work with is a key part of our success – rich media like photos and videos is particularly useful to both promote the work we do and demonstrate the positive effects it has,” says?Neil taylor, CeO.

However, LOCsP’s core purpose is to support the communities around them with engaging youth programmes – not to run and maintain IT systems. As such, to ensure the most efficient use of their funding, the charity adopted an innovative approach to the way they design, procure and run their IT systems.

Rather than employing a dedicated team, LOCsP partnered with independent IT consultant and lifelong Leyton resident Mohammed Ghanty in 2008 to assist in the delivery of their IT strategy. Mohammed joined LOCsP after being brought in to help the charity recover from catastrophic data loss after their legacy on-premise physical server environment crashed.

“LOCsP’s physical environment was quite poorly maintained before I came in. After recovering as much of the lost data as I could from the physical servers, I made some recommendations that they move towards a virtualised environment. They liked the sound of a low cost, more environmentally-friendly solution, and given the data loss they’d just suffered, the opportunities to make backup easier were very attractive too,” says Mohammed Ghanty, Independent IT Consultant. After putting together a proposal to replace LOCsP’s 4 physical servers with one hosting multiple VMs, Mohammed was hired to oversee the charity’s IT systems and strategy going forward. Next on the agenda: LOCsP’s backup systems.

The Solution
Following the server crash, Mohammed suggested that LOCsP consider online backup as a cost-effective alternative to on-site hardware, which required costly and time-consuming maintenance work. However, as a charity that relies heavily on donations, the economic downturn of the last few years seriously impacted the amount of public funding available to LOCsP. As such, upon completing a three-year contract with another provider, Mohammed was eager to reduce costs wherever possible, including his backup budget. Fortunately, that’s when Databarracks got in touch.
“It was really refreshing to work with a company that wasn’t just pushing for the hard sell. Databarracks worked hard to understand our needs, and they’ve been striving to meet them since day one. After a data review exercise I was able to reduce the amount of overall backed up data, whilst benefitting from Databarracks’ tiered storage options.” Databarracks’ technicians conducted a thorough review of LOCsP’s data estate and determined the charity could move almost two thirds of their backed up data onto a more cost-efficient archival storage tier, significantly lowering their costs.

“There are a lot of peripheral benefits with Backup-as a-Service from Databarracks that we just wouldn’t get with other providers. For instance, it also serves as a really effective disaster recovery function for us. If our systems ever go down, I can just rebuild the VMs by streaming the data directly from Databarracks’ environment. The retention policies we’ve established mean that our RPO is already taken care of, and I can do the rest,” said Mohammed. It’s this collaborative relationship that has proven most beneficial for LOCsP. Maintaining a capable IT function can be challenging when resources are limited. However, between an independent consultant like Mohammed and the high levels of service from Databarracks’ support team, the charity have assembled an innovative, robust and, crucially, economical ad-hoc It department.

“The support team are incredibly proactive in the way they manage our day-to-day backups. This kind of service makes LOCsP’s economical approach to IT delivery possible – with the support of a skilled and reliable 3rd party,”?said Mohammed. “Since employing Mohammed, we’ve been able to approach our IT systems much more strategically. For instance, we’re now able to offer many of our employees the opportunity to work from home, which is making us more efficient, productive and resilient to disruption as an organisation. Combined with the level of service we get from Databarracks, it means we can spend more time focusing on helping the community, and less managing our IT infrastructure,” concluded Taylor.