We have been providing professional backup services to the Education Sector since we started over 15 years ago and now have hundreds of terabytes of data secured on our private storage in the UK. A core element of our services for education has always been providing robust SIMS backups and we have never had a situation where we’ve not been able to restore data. However, a common question we get asked is whether or not we are CAPITA SIMS approved, until now our answer has been no, mainly due to the confidence we have in our service.
Nowadays, all industry sectors are seeking comfort in accreditations so we decided to put both of our core backup solutions to test and engaged expertise of CAPITA ESS Consultancy Services to assess our abilities.
The first stage was to run through a detailed training session for the installation, configuration and update of our very own SIMS Server loaded with dummy data. We then went through the finer intricacies of the product including some of the dependencies such as Discovery, FMS, SOLUS, the encrypted document folders and the dbAttach tool.
Once we had a solid understanding of the above, we were invited to demonstrate both of our products in two separate sessions.
First was SafeImage, we configured and set off an image based back up of the server and once completed, used our knowledge to detach the old database, mount an image of the server, restore an old copy of the database and then reattach this to the SIMS Server, we then started SIMS to ensure the changes we had made to the data had been recovered.
Second, was SafeBackup, we configured the File and SQL agents to back up the relevant areas of the server and then proved the functionality by shutting down the SQL Service and then doing an in-place restore of the database. We then tested this and demonstrated that the data had been recovered.
This was followed up with a detailed document that explained our understanding of the requirements for SIMS backups, locations and tools along with links to GDPR Statements and Company Policies.
Following review we were successfully accredited as a CAPITA SIMS Integrator for 2019/20. This is fantastic news for us and will provide an additional layer of confidence in our abilities and services.
