Compass Computer Consultants (Compass), a leading supplier of education software to the further education (FE) sector, has announced an official partnership agreement with specialist IT disaster recovery provider, Plan B.
The partnership will enable Compass to offer FE institutions disaster recovery of their IT servers in less than one hour, one of the fastest recovery time available from a cloud service provider world-wide.
Disaster recovery technology is becoming more essential for organisations in an age of increasing risk of emergencies from flood, fire and terrorism. Downtime alone is costing UK businesses and organisations £2 billion each year in lost revenue.
Plan B helps organisations to identify and manage risks to business continuity caused by IT failure or damage to learning environments, ensuring reduced economic and social impact for both students and teachers in the event of a disaster.
The disaster recovery provider specialises in protecting IT servers, enabling FE institutions to fully recover all servers in approximately 15 to 45 minutes, minimising the loss of vital academic information and student data in the event of an emergency. It is the only disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider that can offer a pre-recovery service, where IT systems are fully recovered and tested in advance – the only way to guarantee 100% success of a full recovery.
The pre-recovery process is also automated, reducing the risk of error and making the service much more cost effective and easy to use.
Compass will offer the solution both to its on-premise and cloud-based customers. The partnership will be a benefit for FE providers that need strong business continuity plans but may not be able to afford more expensive disaster recovery options.
Andy Makeham, Managing Director of Compass, said: “Educational institutions store significant volumes of sensitive data and need reassurance that it can be quickly and completely recovered in the event of a worst case scenario, particularly during busy enrolment and examination periods.
“The partnership with Plan B will enhance Compass’s portfolio by allowing us to deliver a fast, automated and affordable disaster recovery service to our FE customers. It will also provide reassurance to students and teachers that their data is fully protected against loss to assure the continuity of learning that they depend on to achieve their goals.”
Tim Dunger, CEO, Plan B, says: “The cost of IT downtime can make or break an organisation with downtime for the average business costing as much as £1.5 million per annum. This is one of the reasons we are seeing such a demand for our unique pre-recovery service.
“Working with Compass will give us a great opportunity to align with a trusted brand and raise awareness of the importance of the pre-recovery option, which will ultimately give FE institutions peace of mind.”
Organisations looking to justify the cost of business continuity will have access to the Plan B calculator to calculate how much downtime will cost them per outage or per annum.
Compass Computer Consultants has a range of innovative IT Solutions including ProAchieve, a success, retention and achievement analysis system used by 90% of colleges in England. The company is part of Advanced Computer Software Group.
