Cohesity has announced that West Midlands Fire Service has modernised its IT and service strategy with the adoption of a next generation backup and recovery technology solution. The solution is driving improvements that are helping West Midlands Fire Service protect nearly three million UK residents. 

The accessibility and safeguarding of mission-critical data is vital for the smooth operation and rapid response of the Fire Service. Information from emergency vehicles and emergency calls must be retained and archived for legal and security purposes.

Thanks to Cohesity’s hyperconverged platform, this data is easily accessible and efficiently backed up within minutes.

Automated global indexing from Cohesity powers Google-like search, enabling instant wildcard searches for any virtual machine (VM), file, or object and allows West Midlands Fire Service employees to identify necessary data immediately, while immutable snapshots help protect public and private data from ransomware and virus attacks. 

“Many people don’t realise how crucial backups are for services like ours,” said Adrian Scoyne, principal infrastructure engineer, West Midlands Fire Service.

“We need to protect the data generated by our response vehicles because we use that data to mobilise our firefighters for call-outs, and for training. 

“We were looking for a solution that met GDPR requirements and was scalable and affordable. Cohesity checks all of these boxes and has fundamentally changed our whole approach to backups.”

Before implementing the Cohesity solution, the IT team and West Midlands Fire Service would travel 11 miles to an offsite disaster recovery centre every week with backup tapes. Today, a server backup takes five minutes, saving the team over 360 hours a year – the equivalent of almost 2.5 months of time for a full-time engineer.

“Our legacy backup system was so old it required weekly verification checks, which took hours and really affected staff morale,” said Scoyne.

“Today, we have peace of mind that the server is running smoothly and that the quality and security of backups is second to none. The indexing engine means we can isolate files and overcome problems like file deletion and corruption without resorting to a whole back-up restore which simply wastes precious time. The administrative burden has been almost completely lifted.”

West Midlands Fire Service is currently investigating additional Cohesity capabilities, including test-dev functionality in order to make the stored backup data even more productive for the business.