Devon & Cornwall Constabulary Secures Data With CommVault Simpana

The Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, covering the largest geographical police area in England, has selected CommVault Simpana software to help adhere to strict compliance legislation and ensure 24×7 access to sensitive citizen and local authority data.

The responsibility of two counties and a seasonal influx of visitors causes the population to swell from about 1.5 million people to 8 million during the summer months. As with any police force, there is a need for long-term, secure storage for highly sensitive and important information, all required 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. When combined with the additional need to adhere to regulations including the Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information requests, the efficient management and protection of data is critical.

The Devon and Cornwall Constabulary is replacing its existing data protection infrastructure with CommVault software to gain a more flexible, scalable solution to help maximize business uptime and information availability, while streamlining the ability to manage and maintain its backup infrastructure. A review of its existing infrastructure showed that it could not cope with the existing data loads and management requirements, let alone the requirements of new projects such as new fingerprinting techniques and the associated dramatically increasing data loads.

To overcome these challenges, the Constabulary will deploy Simpana software to minimize the number of products under management and therefore its administrative overhead. Using CommVault Backup and Archive software will enable the Constabulary to also enhance service levels and drive down the overall cost of storage and administration.

To continue to operate within guidelines for data availability, the Constabulary needs to reflect a strong business continuity strategy. Using CommVault Backup software, the Constabulary can test for disaster and has means to recover quickly and seamlessly from unscheduled outage. The Constabulary will gain the confidence of increased uptime, as well as continuous availability and easy access to documents, files and other materials.

"Backup and recovery is a key business issue for the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary and CommVault has helped simplify the process for us. We now have just one system to manage, instead of the previous five. CommVault’s Singular Information Management approach offers technology that is easier to manage, control and scale which gives us substantial operational and cost benefits," said Malcolm Waite, project leader for the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.

"We had a number of issues with our existing vendor which were proving difficult to solve. Product support was extremely poor, and the time-to-fix on problems was slow. The infrastructure team was spending more and more time resolving issues and discrepancies between the backups and the backup reports – the team would often find that backups carried out from tapes hadn’t been completed successfully, even though the backup system had reported they were. A revolutionary change was needed and we identified CommVault as the best partner to work with. Deploying the Simpana software will give us a single backup and archive infrastructure, managed from a single point. This will, for the first time, give us confidence in our backups and allow us to take control of data management," continued Waite.

"The reputation of CommVault and our Simpana software is now widely recognised across the industry as a compelling alternative to existing data management solutions. CommVault Simpana is reliable, has lower resource requirements and helps users provide a more superior experience to their customers and constituents," added Steven Rose, vice president of EMEA for CommVault.