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With a mandate from the Scottish Government to reduce costs and duplication of services, one of the first challenges facing SFRS was the need to replace eight disparate backup solutions within its IT infrastructure with a single platform for data management. The priority was developing a data backup and archive strategy that could meet compliance and continuity requirements across a range of critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange 2010, SharePoint, SQL Server, Office and Oracle.

After a thorough assessment of its existing environment, SFRS decided to consolidate using CommVault Simpana software to leverage a common infrastructure and to tackle compliance requirements, in addition to data protection requirements for backup and email archive. "The largest of the legacy fire services, Strathclyde, had been using CommVault Simpana software successfully for five years. Other services were using Symantec BackupExec and manual copy processes," explained Greg Aitken, information and communications technologies (ICT) operations manager, SRFS. "Having considered the options, it was clear that Simpana software's functionality and simplicity of use offered the optimal solution for SFRS."

EFFICIENCY VIA INTELLIGENT ARCHIVING
A critical component of the consolidated SFRS single software solution project was the creation of an enterprise email archive. The majority of legacy fire and rescue services had previously opted to simply increase mailbox size or store PSTs on local machines, network drives, even external USB drives to handle increasing email volumes. As Aitken explained, "Email is a business critical system and an organisation of our size should have a proper, fit-for-purpose email archiving solution."

CommVault is helping SFRS increase operational efficiency and provide nearly instant recovery of emails, which previously the IT team could not guarantee to end users. A major component of the SFRS's business continuity strategy is using Simpana 10 to conduct backup and Disaster Recovery for Active Directory for Exchange mailbox backups and restores for the organisation's more than 9,000 users. SFRS is now assured that in the event of a disaster, it can safely mitigate any risk of data loss and restore user email and other data quickly to avoid any productivity impacts.

CommVault Simpana software has also transformed the email discovery and retrieval process, in particular, when historical email is essential for evidence. In the past, it has been an extensive and resource intensive process to locate the specific emails and then restore them from backup. SRFS can now locate and retrieve archived emails, when required, within seconds.

Aitken explained, "Email uses significant amounts of data storage, and as this data increases, simple retrieval, search, indexing and backup operations slow systems down. Simpana 10 archiving improves email server performance and storage efficiency by removing email and attachments from the messaging server but leaves them accessible to end users via their existing email client applications."

SELF-SERVICE ACCESS TO INFORMATION
Simpana 10's intelligent archive features, including OnePass and Enterprise Search, help SFRS significantly reduce risk and cost while providing faster access to archived documents and files. Simpana OnePass helps SFRS to shrink backup windows and increase storage efficiencies through backup functionality that simultaneously deduplicates and archives data in the ContentStore - a virtual repository that provides a flexible and cost-effective way to store data. SFRS end users can then easily access and retrieve their files through Simpana 10's powerful search feature.

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