A recent episode of school fires saw most of Selsey Academy in West Sussex going up in flames. Strangely enough, in an unrelated fire, considerable damage was also caused to Cecil Jones Academy in Southend on the same day.

Data and Records Damage

Selsey was worse off with the structural damage being reported as “extensive” and some 453 pupils that had to be accommodated elsewhere. BBC reported Deputy Chief Fire Officer, Gavin Watts, saying, “There was little that could be done to stop [the fire] spreading so quickly and it is a sad sight to see such a local asset so badly damaged.”

Accidents Do Happen

No foul play is suspected and both incidents have been ascribed to accidental fires being sparked by on-site workmen busy with normal maintenance of the building.

A Silver Lining to the Smoke Cloud

At the time Head Teacher, Tom Garfield, told BBC Sussex that the school’s digital records were being restored but that it was difficult to determine what remained of the written records. The reason for Mr Garfield’s calm was that Selsey Academy had a disaster recovery plan which they had already implemented with the use of a cloud-based backup storage system. Regular data backups were not unfamiliar to the school.

A Cloud Backup Provider In Need…

Technicians from Redstor (Selsey’s cloud backup storage provider) were at the DR location to assist with the technical side of the recovery process. By 2 September 2016, just more than a week after the incident, Redstor’s Technical Support Team Leader, Farid Ouazzani, said, “This morning we’ve confirmed that each of their servers have been recovered successfully. It’s not often we have to do full environment restores of this profile but unfortunate as it was for the school, it serves as a good reminder of what we [as a backup provider] are contributing to on a daily basis.”

Other Cloud Backup Benefits

Selsey Academy is not a special case when it comes to benefits of cloud-based backup. When it comes to implementing a disaster recovery plan, it’s a powerful technology that lends itself to significant capabilities that facilitate reliable backups and quick recovery:

• Off-site copies of your data means that a natural disaster does not affect the backed up data
• The data is accessible from a remote location, such as a disaster recovery location
• The storage capacity scales with the demand of the user
• The cost escalates minimally because it’s relative to the usage

The hardware cost is borne by cloud provider – this is especially useful for companies that choose to focus their expenditure on their core business.