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Test Valley is a local government authority in Hampshire, England, named after the valley of the River Test. The council has its head office in Andover in the north of the borough, with a customer service facility in Romsey serving residents in the south. The borough was formed in 1974 by a merger of the boroughs of Andover and Romsey, along with Andover Rural District, and Romsey and Stockbridge Rural District.

Test Valley covers 650 km2 of western Hampshire, stretching from boundaries with Southampton in the south to Newbury in the north. Test Valley is a predominantly rural area. It encompasses the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Test Valley Borough Council provides a diverse range of services to residents and businesses, from processing planning applications to waste collection and local businesses support

SAFEGUARDING DATA AT TWO COUNCILS
As well as improving local services, the council is highly focused on achieving efficiencies. To help achieve this, it entered into a shared IT services partnership with Winchester City Council in 2011, which builds on other joint projects and collaborations between the two authorities. Tony Fawcett, Head of IT at Test Valley Borough Council explains, "The combination of systems and suppliers has achieved savings of over £300,000 and also enables consolidation of systems and suppliers to generate further savings."

The IT service at Test Valley Borough Council is responsible for using technology to enhance productivity for staff, achieve operational efficiencies and ensure the delivery of high quality services for residents and businesses. Both Test Valley Borough and Winchester City councils had various backup technologies in place at their sites, including tape units and disparate pieces of software, with knowledge about the various systems and processes held by individual engineers.

Fawcett reveals, "Previously, we were backing up one of our sites to the main storage network, but this didn't offer the level of protection we needed. We had various disaster recovery plans in place, but none which would meet our four-hour full core recovery ambitions and goals." The de-centralised approach to data backup was also becoming increasingly complex and inefficient to maintain. The organisation recognised that with a single, scalable and effective backup solution for both council sites, it would be able to reduce recovery time from days to hours and reduce costs.

"Now we have consolidated the two council infrastructures, we needed to find a reliable, automated backup solution that we could initially use at Test Valley Borough Council and Winchester City Council with a view to extending it to additional environments to accommodate new partners," explains Fawcett. "Our internal customer is the shared partnership, so we needed to find a solution that would meet our existing needs and also accommodate future partnership growth."

CENTRALISED RECOVERY MANAGEMENT
Following a detailed evaluation process, Test Valley Borough Council opted to implement CA's ARCserve D2D, Backup and Replication. The solutions were initially implemented at the Test Valley Borough Council site. With extensive management features that work together to help reduce the time spent managing backups, CA ARCserve Backup provides "enterprise-class" functionality that is optimised to support clients' IT architecture, including virtual and cloud-based technologies, no matter how simple or complex the data or IT infrastructure is. CA ARCserve Backup helps user organisations quickly prepare for, respond to and recover from the disasters and disruptions that would otherwise threaten the integrity and reliability of their business operations. ARCserve D2D is designed to complement existing tape backup solutions by providing disk-based backup, bare-metal restore to dissimilar hardware and the ability to back up critical data every 15 minutes, while ARCserve Replication provides an easy way to copy backups to an off-site location via a wide area network (WAN) for disaster recovery purposes.

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