Operational Efficiency – How Carlisle Council protects business-critical email and multi-agency data

Carlisle City Council provides public services to 100,000 people living in the city and surrounding area. Carlisle seeks to improve public services through information and communications technology (ICT), including sharing the management of IT services with a neighbouring council. The Council needed to safeguard its e-mail data more effectively to ensure rapid recovery if a disaster or human error occurred.

With increasing demands from staff to use e-mail for critical work, Carlisle City Council needed a robust and reliable solution so that mailboxes could be recovered quickly in the event of a fault in the infrastructure. The council also needed an improved backup system for its corporate intranet built on Windows SharePoint Services.

In addition to around 800 staff within the council itself, Carlisle provides IT services to voluntary organisations in the district. The council is also merging its IT team with neighbouring Allerdale Borough Council, which has 400 employees, as part of its support for the government shared services agenda. By sharing services such as human resources, and payroll, local authorities can achieve savings and free key people for higher value tasks.

With the support of Microsoft partner, Risual, Carlisle City Council has implemented Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager to back up all its user data every 15 minutes instead of daily, ensuring business continuity. With the Microsoft solution, the technician time needed to manage backup and recovery has been reduced by up to 75 per cent, thereby freeing IT staff for higher value work.

You can read the full story of how Carlisle City Council is achieving greater ICT operational efficiency using Microsoft System Center here.

Posted by Ian