Education and Research

Others may talk of ‘company values’, ‘our values’ or have a ‘value statement’, but we steer clear of such ideas.  Values are too personal and transient. 

Values have no automatic moral foundation.  A ‘value statement’ does not express ‘ought’ or ‘should’. A value statement conveys that something has merit or worth, but it does not say what should be done.  Hitler was value-driven; Saddam Hussein was value-driven.  Every person and organisation can be driven by what they value. But they are not necessarily ethical or principle-centred.

Schools, further education, higher education and university research departments are naturally rich in data.  There is administrative, research and curriculum data being produced and stored on computers on an increasing basis.

A school with one thousand students can have enormous amounts of data produced by the students themselves.  Even if restricted to say 20MB each, pupils can generate 20GB of data for a school to deal with.  This is to be added to the less voluminous yet important administrative data concerning staff, pupils and school management.

Both further education and higher education establishments have similar issues to schools, with higher volumes and often multiple locations to manage.  And the very nature of a university research department creates knowledge, which is founded in the data stored on computers.

Confidentiality and security are key demands.  For a school to lose the project work of a pupil would be disruptive.  For a university to lose years of research work would be a tragedy.

In a similar way to a commercial organisation, schools and colleges have little time to deal with tape based backup.  There is rarely a dedicated IT person in smaller schools or colleges and, in larger establishments, there are too many projects to be completed to waste time on backup.

A bonus for most education establishments however is the availability broad band access - often with capacities exceeding many commercial organisations.

Online Backup Benefits

Online backup ensures:

• Automatic and daily backup of all vital data without wasting staff or management time.
• Reduced risk of disrupting student progress though inadvertent data loss.
• Full records of student and staff life is always available in case of future need.
• Data recovery is fast and efficient without specialist IT support.
• Reassurance that your national and local reputation will not be damaged by accidental loss of data.
• Minimal time is wasted in dealing with backup and recovery.

Plus for central support organisations:

• Significantly reduce the support overheads of protecting remote premise data by automating backup, storing data offsite and allowing simple, fast local data restores.
• Ensure that backups happen daily and that staff are not wasting valuable productive time managing backups or chasing lost data.
• Take advantage of broad band availability to backup locally thus reducing leased line or other network bandwidth usage.
• Benefit from special non-commercial rates.

Backup Direct™ Services

Our services are available for laptops, PCs and files servers.  Our PC packages can backup from 500MB through to 30GB per machine and our file server packages cover from 10GB through to 100GB per machine.

You can subscribe to our services on a machine by machine basis paying for what you need as you need it.  Or you can take a site solution, meaning one single fixed monthly fee, transferring usage from machine to machine or person to person as your organisation evolves.

Remember also, that upgrades are free.  So there is no need to purchase any more capacity than you need today - our service will expand as your needs do.

What next?

Recognising the unique requirements and budget constraints or education establishments allows Backup Direct™ to offer special pricing discounts not available to commercial organisations.  Speak with one of our advisors on the number below, indicating your status and they will provide you with preferential pricing details.

Our online backup is secure, simple and affordable.  If you are not sure what to do next, here are a few options:

Try our service for free and see how effective online backup can be.  You can download the fully working software here; the installation takes only five minutes even for a non-technical person.  Within ten minutes you can be backing up.

Or, if you would like to know more, then call one of our advisers on 0800 0 789 437.  They will be happy to discuss your particular requirements, explain in more detail how the process works and provide larger capacity trial software if you would like to backup all your data.