1. The Progression of Cloud Computing
in Further Education Colleges
Section 4.3
Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
A study based on Cloud Technology projects managed by the
Association of Colleges and funded by the Skills Funding
Agency - 2012 - 2013
November 2013

2. Detailed outcomes from Individual Projects
4.3 Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
There has always been a need in Colleges for robust disaster recovery services. The challenge of
providing on-site or College-owned off-site back-up and disaster recovery provision is increasing.
Factors which influence this include the need to back up and recover an increasing amount of data
and to maintain critical services. This implies ongoing server and software upgrading/
replacement and increased staff support if handled internally. A further factor is the changing
nature of Colleges including increased employer engagement and involvement in federations
which include academies and university technical Colleges. This increased business implies
greater demands on disaster recovery services.
Moving disaster recovery services to the cloud has the potential for increasing capacity as required
and sharing management charges with other users. It can also increase the security of data by
removing dependence on key internal staff.
The Projects
Two projects were focused wholly on disaster recovery:
South Tyneside College
South Tyneside’s key challenge was that one third of their turnover was derived from learners in
the Marine Industry located in 73 countries. This added to the disaster recovery requirements in
requiring 24/7 support. The campus front-end server is replicated in the cloud. As the project is
focused on disaster recovery there hasn’t been any impact yet, other than the theoretical impact
that if the College were to have a disaster it would minimize its downtime. South Tyneside use
Microsoft Azure for their disaster recovery service.
Walsall College
Walsall College’s key challenge was to provide robust disaster recovery in a context where their
two main buildings were close together and where their responsibilities include 2 academies and
a university technical College.
Walsall College has integrated
public and personal cloud
solutions to significantly increase
the resilience of their disaster
recovery plan. The College is
developing a seamless
integration between our on-site
private cloud and public cloud
solutions to reduce
server infrastructure replacement
costs while maintaining
excellent service uptime. By
ensuring data integrity and availability in the event of a disaster and by making older data
available for future retrieval, all users of Walsall Colleges IT infrastructure could benefit.

3. A further two projects included a significant disaster recovery activity.
Joseph Chamberlain College: This involves the back-up to the cloud, using Redstor, of all of the
College’s data systems. (The other part of the project is concerned with the migration of email
accounts to the cloud using Microsoft 365.)
South Devon College: This initially involves the back-up of some key servers to the cloud and
then, if need be, these could be used as an option for disaster recovery. This consisted of installing
Assigra software onto one of the College’s virtual servers which was responsible for creating
back-ups, deduplication and uploading to the cloud data centre overnight. The second phase
involved testing the disaster recovery of these servers by instructing the data centre to power on
backed-up servers one by one and for the College to test each one thoroughly to prove they could
be used in case of a disaster. (The second part of the project was to set up a remote farm of servers to allow
students, teaching staff and remote workers to access all College systems.)
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4. Outcomes
It should be noted that there is a difference between full disaster recovery and data back-up.
Similarities
All Colleges were faced with growing and more exacting demands for disaster recovery.
South Tyneside College and Walsall College identified challenges and risks with their
on-site provision.
The facility to release staff and equipment for other applications was a common element.
Colleges anticipate significant savings in the region of £20,000 - £70,000. Project and change
management was executed smoothly and limited to IT staff.
Differences
Item
Cloud Host
South Tyneside
Microsoft Azure
Security
Public / Private Replication of front
Cloud
end server in the
cloud
Supplier
experiences
Agreement with
Microsoft took a
long time as it was
a first in the field
Walsall
Amazon Glacier
Joseph Chamberlain
Redstor
Emphasis on
encryption
Integration of
on-site and public
cloud services
Rigorous
selection process
from many
suppliers
South Devon
Selected
systems backed
up
Straight forward
Worked with
Deverills as a
partner
Delivery Models
South Tyneside College: This has involved using Microsoft Azure hosting and development
services. Virtual machines to host and replicate all College data sets and applications servers have
been created.
Walsall College: Walsall College has integrated public and personal cloud solutions to
significantly increase the resilience of its disaster recovery plan. The College has developed a
seamless integration between its on-site private cloud and public cloud solutions to reduce server
infrastructure replacement costs while maintaining excellent service uptime. The cloud provider is
Amazon Glacier.
The College required all data to be encrypted by Walsall College before it was transferred across
to the cloud provider. The data is encrypted with a 448-bit data key before transfer and remains
encrypted at the data centre until recovery is requested. The data centre is compliant with ISO
27001 and BS 25999. This maintains the College’s ownership of the data as it can only be read with
knowledge of these encryption keys. Several software solutions were tested before settling on one
that fulfilled these criteria.
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5. Joseph Chamberlain College: This has involved the online back-up of College servers to Redstor
servers using the Janet link. To achieve this, Redstor agents were installed on the College servers.
For the larger servers, the initial back-ups were made to hard drives which were transported to
Redstor with subsequent back-ups being online. Daily differential and weekly back-ups of all
College servers are taking place.
South Devon College: This has involved the College working with partner, Deverills, to achieve
back- up in the cloud of College servers.
Supplier Relationships
South Tyneside College: Microsoft Azure.
“Signing up with a cloud provider was significantly harder than anticipated. Whilst it appears
relatively straight forward to sign up at commercial rates (i.e. only requirement being a credit
card) obtaining an educational discount proved to be a challenge. Neither the resellers we were
working with, nor Microsoft themselves, had a clear idea of what was required. Microsoft told
us the issues we had were because we were one of the first people to sign up. This is fair enough
as one of the purposes of pilots is to find and resolve issues and they do now seem to have now
corrected these issues.“
The Microsoft contacts we were working with indicated that as far as they were aware we were
the first educational establishment to sign up for an Azure educational contract in the UK. As a
result all parties were feeling their way through the process; this resulted in delays resulting from
the need to obtain clarification from Microsoft head office in the US on certain points, incorrect
paperwork having been submitted etc. As a result, an activity that was expected to be quite
simple turned out to be protracted and painful.
Microsoft have resolved the paperwork issues encountered. We have signed up for additional
cloud contracts with them since and process was very straightforward. I know of other Colleges
who’ve done the same without issue.”
Walsall College:
“We tried a variety of different cloud providers and software solutions to archive Walsall
College’s data in the cloud. We settled on Amazon Glacier and have recently completed a
complete upload of all important data to the cloud. Evaluation included price/GB and took into
account bandwith costs. We have evaluated several cloud solutions including Crash Plan,
EduServ, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Crash Plan and Amazon Glacier were both found to be
cost effective. During the course of this project pricing was continually changing and it was
difficult to assess a long/medium term cost to storing our data in the cloud. Evaluating costs of
different cloud providers can be difficult due to different cost structures (e.g. CPU, Memory,
storage, bandwidth and I/O can all be charged in different ways).”
An important factor in the supplier decision is the location of the data centre, which should be
kept in the EU for legal/access reasons. Walsall’s data on Amazon Glacier are held in Ireland.
Joseph Chamberlain College: Working with Redstor has proceeded smoothly.
South Devon College: The only significant issue was with the sign-up of a cloud contract.
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6. Project and Change Management
South Tyneside College: All technical aspects of the project have proceeded well; the major lesson
learnt was that the time it took to sign up for a ‘new’ service was significantly longer than
expected. Hopefully, given that these issues were the result of the resellers and Microsoft not
having procedures in place and having to develop them as we went along, people following us
should not encounter these issues!
Walsall College: Change management was limited in this project as the College had no current
long term archive solution.
Joseph Chamberlain College: IT project management for cloud back-up has proceeded smoothly.
South Devon College: Most of the changes have been related to internal IT processes and have
therefore had limited impact and have only affected IT staff.
SLAs
South Tyneside College: The main SLA is
between the College and Microsoft Azure.
Walsall College: The main SLA is between the
College and Amazon Glacier.
Joseph Chamberlain College: The main SLA is
between the College and Redstor.
South Devon College: The main SLA is between
the College and cloud hosting provider.
Impact
South Tyneside College: The process and
procedures developed during this project have
improved the accessibility of disaster recovery
provision and should reduce the workload on
the team responsible for these systems. This will
allow the time that the network service team
currently spends monitoring and maintaining these systems to be spent on strategic objectives,
such as migration to Office 365. The full impact of this should become evident over the next 9-12
months.
At present, student experience is difficult to quantify and is likely to remain so. The systems and
procedures developed during this project will come into play in the event of a major disaster or IT
failure at the main campus. Should this occur these facilities should ensure that the student
experience has the least disruption possible. In addition, the time spent by IT staff maintaining the
equipment in the onsite DR room can now be spent supporting students or implementing other
projects.
Walsall College: By ensuring data integrity and availability in the event of a disaster and by
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7. making older data available for future retrieval all users of Walsall Colleges IT infrastructure could
benefit.
“This project has given us the option to release expensive and required on-site storage to be
better utilised for other more business-critical solutions. The changes are transparent to the
student but have allowed us to go back further with our archiving and data recovery should the
student lose data. We have significantly improved the IT services department’s understanding of
public cloud solutions and have enhanced the College’s business continuity plan with the use of
cloud solutions.”
Joseph Chamberlain College:
“Online back-up is working very well. It removes the ‘techie’ aspect that is often associated with
managing an in house backup solution that can consist of a number of technical components.”
South Devon College: Servers are backed up to the cloud – no local back-up is required and no
tape back-up for disaster recovery. The cost of data to the cloud proved to be more expensive than
expected.
Joseph Chamberlain College:
“Online back-up is working very well. It removes the ‘techie’ aspect that is often associated with
managing an in house backup solution that can consist of a number of technical components.”
South Devon College: Servers are backed up to the cloud – no local back-up is required and no
tape back-up for disaster recovery. The cost of data to the cloud proved to be more expensive than
expected.ck-up for disaster recovery. The cost of data to the cloud proved to be more expensive
than expect.
Savings
South Tyneside College:
“Currently an onsite DR room has been established on the opposite side of the campus from the
server room. The current DR equipment will reach the end of its planned life in summer 2013;
replacements would cost approximately £70,000. The DR room could also be reused for other
purposes.”
Walsall College: Future costs savings have been estimated at around £20,000. On the last occasion
we refreshed our on-site backup solution we spent approximately £24,000 on hardware plus £6500
on software. With the requirement to increase the amount of time we store back-up data we
expected this cost to increase at the next refresh. Our testing and implementation shows Walsall
College could save approximately £20,000 on our next back-up refresh by keeping the on-site
storage to a minimum and by extending our existing refresh cycle by at least one academic year.
This project has given us the option to release expensive and required on-site storage to be better
utilised for other more business-critical solutions. The changes are transparent to the student but
have allowed us to go back further with our archiving and data recovery should the student lose
data.
South Devon College: Data costs can accurately be calculated by the hosting company in late
Autumn 2013.
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8. Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
South Tyneside College: Perceived concerns over use of the cloud within the College have been
reduced; this has helped pave the way for the adoption of other cloud services.
Walsall College: The project has shown that the use of the cloud for hosting services which will be
primarily accessed via the LAN is feasible and practical. Concerns in relation to latency and
bandwidth which were raised by some staff have proven to be unfounded.
Joseph Chamberlain College and South Devon College: Smooth operation of these two projects
indicates future sustainability now that cloud-based back-up solutions have been implemented.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
South Tyneside College: The development process used is replicable for any College wishing to
migrate data and applications servers to Microsoft Azure. South Tyneside College also produced a
guide to dissaster recovery for the AoC entitled ‘Utilising the Cloud for Disaster Recovery’
www.aoc.co.uk/cloud_computing/case_studies
Walsall College: The approach is replicable for College federations wishing to use Amazon
Glacier. The encryption approach should be considered by all Colleges who are backing up
sensitive information in the cloud.
Joseph Chamberlain College: The approach is replicable for single Colleges wishing to implement
a Redstor solution.
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9. With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the
development of this report and consultant Chris West
The Association of Colleges 2013
2-5 Stedham Place, London, WC1A 1HU
Tel: 020 7034 9900 Fax: 020 7034 9955
Email: projects@aoc.co.uk website: www.aoc.co.uk