South Lanarkshire Council Case Study

South Lanarkshire Council provides services for 308,000 people and looks after a large area within central and southern Scotland. They have 16,250 employees (6000 working part-time) and a gross annual budget of around £1 billion. The Council also uses a variety of Network Management technologies including CiscoWorks.

The Challenge

Every organisation does their best to ensure that they are protected in the event of a network device failure, but even so face the prospect of re-configuring each and every one of their network devices. For an organisation that is run completely online, any downtime becomes even more business critical than usual.
There are numerous solutions on the market that back up and restore data on servers in the event of a system failure, these solutions do not deal with the configuration of network devices.

The Council had a great many multi-vendor network devices and were looking for a single, robust and dedicated solution for managing the backup and restoration of the configuration files, as Paul McNair, IT Manager (Networks) at the Council explained;
“It’s not as if we had neglected the issue of device configuration, but we were using CiscoWorks, which we found to be not as straightforward as we would like - it required a fair amount of manual intervention and was a little flaky for our specific purposes of trying to back up our configurations. It also doesn’t support the backing up of the configuration of other vendors’ devices.

The Solution

Restorepoint is an Award-Winning Disaster Recovery solution for Networks, which makes it easy to automatically backup and store the configurations of your network devices and to restore them when needed, all from one convenient central location, with an easy to use web interface. A secure and hardened appliance, it is the only vendor independent appliance on the market and the first product to address this commonly overlooked issue.

As well as backing up the configuration of your devices, Restorepoint also transparently encrypts all sensitive information (authentication credentials, device configurations etc). Backups can either be scheduled or just run on-demand, and old backups are automatically removed based on a configurable retention policy. Restorepoint MSP edition also supports multi-domain functionaility enabling you to segregate devices by type, departments or customers, or by an administrators role.

Restorepoint is self-maintaining, and after the initial configuration, requires virtually no user intervention: with backups and software updates configured to happen automatically, you only receive a notification if there is a problem requiring attention, or if you choose to be notified when device configuration changes are detected.
The Council have over 500 devices on their network and therefore opted for the RSP-1000 model which is suitable for up to 1,000 devices.

The Results

South Lanarkshire Council have been delighted with the performance and simplicity of the solution since its installation:
“Restorepoint has been very good - all of the guys here are very impressed with it. It is very easy to set up and use and works very well indeed - as a result it has made our internal processes faster. I’m sure it will prove to be well worth the investment - we’ve already made use of it on a number of occasions to restore service quickly and easily when devices have failed.

The appliance makes life far easier and more secure - we don’t have to constantly change things and can pretty much let it work automatically unless there are any real issues - which of course it notifies us about straight away. It also provides a valuable audit function, allowing us to determine when individual configuration changes were made, and to regress them if necessary. I’d be more than happy to recommend this solution to anyone who has multiple appliances to configure.”

Paul McNair, IT Manager (Networks), South Lanarkshire Council.