The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) is a statutory levy board that was established in 2008 through three separate agricultural organisations. AHDB is funded by farmers and growers in the UK, with the mission to improve farm business efficiency and competitiveness in the industry.
The AHDB Group has now firmly rooted itself in its relationship with virtualDCS, taking advantage of one of the UK’s most advanced and secure IT disaster recovery systems, CloudCover.
The solution presented to the AHDB has now been awarded the Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Project of the Year at the prestigious 2022 Storage, Digitalization and Cloud (SDC) Awards.
The challenge of protecting data has never been greater, with it now being held in local sites, on public clouds and SaaS solutions. This project was novel as AHDB wanted to protect backup data and provide DR for these scenarios, but they didn’t want their protection on the public cloud.
Jamie Blakeman, IT support manager at AHDB, explained: “When it came to procuring a new disaster recovery solution, we knew we wanted a robust DR plan, with a system that would offer minimal recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), as well as using some of the best technology available. Ultimately, being able to access our data quickly and easily, and under any circumstances, was a key requirement.”
Potential suppliers were sought through G-Cloud, which is the UK Government framework that enables the public sector to procure IT services via the Digital Marketplace. virtualDCS was selected because the company could provide a robust DR solution, with very low RPOs, through its single CloudCover service.
In addition, it needed to be a secure and disaster proof backup and recovery system that offered native, near-time replication, as well as being easy to use, meaning in the event of an incident, they have the freedom and autonomy to immediately invoke it themselves.
Deploying the CloudCover solution enabled AHDB to protect and replicate their data from on-premise and Azure servers, as well as Microsoft 365. It offered full backups and near real-time failover of their systems, as well as protecting against ransomware and other cyber threats.
Jamie Blakeman commented, “Our old solution was a dated product, and was difficult and complicated to use. Now we know that data, files, and systems can be quickly restored.” virtualDCS ensured the new system was up and running in a matter of weeks and after initially installing the hardware racking and software, our team was able to configure most of the system remotely after the initial hardware installation.
Kerri Milburn, project delivery specialist at virtualDCS stated: “By bringing top-tier applications together, we can provide fast and reliable offsite protection. The solution protects both the onsite and public cloud workloads to the DR site in question, across different locations with ease, as well as providing the desired RPOs and RTOs. This gives AHDB peace of mind that they can failover to replica virtual machines on our platform with minimal user interruption.”
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