Management of Disaster Recovery / Stolen Server

The Problem / Situation

Nottingham Hairdressing Training Agency (NHTA) specialises in providing Government approved training, accreditation and apprenticeships for hairdressing, barbering and customer service.

A break in at the NHTA’s Head Office, during the summer bank holiday weekend, resulted in the company server being stolen.

The server was critical to the operation of the business and held all company information including accounts software, bespoke business software, emails, company files, user files and the network configuration.

The theft brought down all critical business systems and effectively prevented the company from trading. This incident, posed a significant reputational and financial risk to the business and a rapid solution was needed to rectify the problem to ensure that the company could continue to operate.

The Solution

Air-IT immediately attended NHTA’s business premises to assess the severity of the incident and rapidly actioned a disaster recovery procedure.

After prioritising the recovery of business systems, we; re-established internet access, email capability, printers and basic file sharing. Access was then provided to their bespoke PIC’s database, a critical aspect of their business operations.

Subsequently, a replacement server was ordered for next day delivery. On arrival, the new server (Hewlett Packard) was built, preinstalled and reconfigured with the latest version of Microsoft Small Business and Exchange Servers in preparation for the migration of recovered data.

All business data was recovered from NHTA’s backup tapes, the process took a significant amount of time and was not completed until the early hours of the following morning. The necessary line of business software was then reinstalled on the new server, along with the recovered data ready to be deployed at their business premises.

The recovery phase included the following key steps:

1. Installation and re-configuring of Microsoft Small Business Server
2. Installation and recovery of Microsoft Exchange
3. Migration of restored data to the server
4. Re-joining computers to the network
5. Post installation floor walking to ensure seamless installation and migration of recovered data

Symantec Backup Exec was also installed to provide a comprehensive data protection solution and improved disaster recovery. The traditional tape backups were replaced with hard disc storage (RDX) providing a quicker, more robust and easier to manage data backup solution.

Air-IT provided all supporting hardware and software with a full maintenance / support contract.

The Outcome

The client’s critical business systems were up and running within under 2 days and the entire disaster recovery procedure took a total of just 5 days from the initial reporting of the incident (to Air-IT) to the recovery and re-creation of the company’s entire IT environment.

This saved the company from certain non-trading and a potential loss in revenue had the systems not been restored effectively within the fast turnaround time.

All company data was successfully recovered and restored seamlessly (from existing backup tapes) which meant that the business could operate as normal with a minimal impact on operations.

The new server solution provided a complete new IT environment for the business based on the latest Microsoft technologies. This provided a stable, reliable and future proof platform which will support future company growth.

The company benefits from a more efficient, reliable and resilient data backup strategy which has vastly improved business continuity.

Automated scheduled backups are performed daily to ensure critical business data is continuously protected and ready for restore in the event of failure / disaster. The server can be re-imaged (in event of a failure) which vastly reduces downtime and potential disruption to the business as opposed to previous tape backup solution.

Client Feedback

Charlotte Moreland, Business Development Director of NHTA described Air-IT as follows:

“Air-IT is very responsive to our needs and they always deal with any issues straight away. Their remote access technology is fantastic and a godsend when getting things resolved quickly.

The issue over bank holiday weekend prevented our business from operating and Air-IT got us up and running extremely quickly. There was a lot of sensitive data on the server, critical to our business, which they managed to successfully recover. They were very quick at solving the problem and are a really reliable company to work with, which is what you need from your IT support provider.”