Customer Case Study: Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery (DR) Solutions – Education

United Data Technologies (UDT) is currently supporting a Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery initiative for this Private Pre-K-12 education client.

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”) 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

  1. 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 on how to return to original state— especially surrounding the school’s physical location in South Miami, FL.
  2. 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).

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