Customer Case Study: Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery (DR) Solutions – Education
CLIENT – EDUCATION VERTICAL
Private education (pre-K-12) located in Southern Florida. Single-campus; part of an association of schools across the United States and internationally.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
United Data Technologies (UDT) is currently supporting a Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery initiative for this Private Pre-K-12 education client. This is an essential project for the organization for effective information management, for transformative modernization of the school’s IT services – as part of an overall project by UDT for the school – and because its’ campus is located in Southern Florida, it is susceptible to extreme weather conditions (hurricanes) that can impact critical services.
UDT has offered highly cost-effective services to this Private Pre-K-12 education client. Among these, the move to Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery commenced when the costs of maintaining four to five (4 – 5) physical services on-premises (“on-prem”) on the school’s campus, and physical servers in a co-location facility became prohibitive for this pre-K-12 learning institution. UDT was able to provide scope and pricing for significantly reduced-cost disaster recovery services for this private pre-K-12 education client through its Microsoft Gold- Competency Partner relationship, employing the DRaaS Azure Site Recovery solution. This initiative would be one of several for the client, focused on Microsoft-based solutions.
- Deal Size: Approximately $12,000
- Closed Date: October 2017
- Vertical/Region: Pre-K-12 Education (private school); Southern Florida
CO-SELL OPPORTUNITY
UDT is a Microsoft Gold-competency Partner. UDT’s project for this private pre-K-12 education client, and for all Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery initiatives, represents “a cloud-based disaster recovery solution from Azure that provides data backup and high availability to protect all major IT systems”. UDT’s collaborative solutions with Microsoft also offer a “best-in-class Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to ensure application availability and fast recovery”.
AZURE DISASTER RECOVERY PROOF POINTS
- Azure DR was tailored for UDT’s private pre-K-12 education client specifically to provide rapid installation and upgrades, rapid recovery, and with specifications how to return to original state— especially surrounding the school’s physical location in South Miami, FL.
- Moving this private pre-K-12 education client from physical servers on-prem with servers in a co-location for DR paradigm – with the majority of existing, hosted services running on Microsoft platforms – to Microsoft Azure DR was a straightforward solution. This included supporting Microsoft Windows 10 Hyper-V.
UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS
UDT’s Microsoft Azure DR solution for this private pre-K-12 education client was delivered to support critical business applications and a three (3) server package to provide failover and recovery of the Student Information System (grading, student records, administrative information such as schedules, etc.).
ONGOING ENGAGEMENT
- UDT provides support for private pre-K-12 education client for the Microsoft Azure DR installation – including patches and upgrades/ continued modernization – through a managed services engagement.
- There is a potential engagement in the next calendar year to migrate all of UDT’s private pre-K-12 education client’s Student Information System services to Microsoft Azure cloud (Azure Migration).
