Everton Football Club Selects Backup Technology

Backup Technology, the UK’s online backup and disaster recovery provider, has been selected by Everton Football Club to protect its data and ensure business continuity. By offering unlimited capacity and data management, Backup Technology can guarantee that Everton will never lose any data from its files or mail servers.

Previously, Everton Football Club relied on a tape backup system for its 2 terabytes of files, which include emails and databases for ticketing, merchandising and customer relationship management. But this was unreliable and time-consuming.

“A member of staff had to spend about two hours every morning ensuring the overnight backup had gone okay and that there were no errors,” says Stephen Fell, Head of IT at Everton Football Club. “There was also a security concern because tapes were stored at the office and transferred to another site once a month, making them potentially vulnerable to damage, theft or loss.”

Everton acted on the advice of Liverpool Football Club, which had implemented Backup Technology’s 100% failsafe system and highly recommended it. Backup Technology took just a week to install a similar system at Everton, including all the data from the club’s Finch Farm training ground and academy as well as its head office. “The whole process was transparent, painless and quick,” says Mr Fell. The data is streamed to Backup Technology’s data centre and daily reports are sent to the administrative office in Everton to verify the task has been successfully completed. What we have gained is not just backup, but disaster recovery,” says Mr Fell. “If an email server fails we can restore the data to another server and have the whole lot up and running within 24 hours. If someone loses a file, even a single email, it can be recovered within minutes rather than the couple of hours it used to take. So I have peace of mind and can sleep at night without worrying.”

There is no doubt the system has delivered a return on investment, says Mr Fell. “In addition to reduced administration time, there are cost savings in not having to buy tapes, backup hardware, and software licences. Another advantage is that instead of building up massive tape archives we can have all the data archived and available online for as long as we need it.”

Mr Fell praises the high level of service and support provided by Backup Technology. “If we have an issue, Backup Technology’s response time is very good,” he says. “I really couldn’t believe the efficiency of the system. I didn’t think it could be that simple but it was-a great solution which I’d thoroughly recommend.”

Ritchie Fiddes, Sales Director at Backup Technology comments: “In the event of a disaster, or system failure, Everton Football Club is guaranteed that we can retrieve any lost data in a matter of minutes, rather than days. In addition, the agentless nature of our solutions makes it simple to protect data spread across remote sites whilst the automatic deduplication means that it is possible to protect over 2TB of data using a standard broadband connection.”